We had a spam attack earlier this morning on this website. If you are subscribed to the "Inventive Uses of Media" group, you probably received the email with about 100 links. Please don't click on any of those links! This may be pertinent to the symposium though, especially if you are interested in utilizing web 2.0 functionality on your campus websites and bringing in larger communities to participate in online discussions. On this website, there is actually some pretty sophisticated spam-blocking software installed and we have managed to block all other attacks, but this one still snuck through. The problem has been addressed, IP addresses blocked, and security increased. This is problematic though, because the spammers continue to get more sophisticated and the further you take the security, the more difficult it makes it for a "real" visitor to post on the website.

The bottom line though is that your website will be dead in the water within a couple months if you don't use some sort of security features. Spamming for social network websites, especially those that support efforts that don't have big budgets (most of the efforts out there!), is a real problem and could undermine many of the legitimate scholarly efforts that these types of websites could add a great deal of value to.

We use open-source software to fight the spam, but while the software is free, you still have to make the effort of trying to stay ahead of the spammers. It isn't incredibly time-consuming, but it is something that you should take into account if you try out these techniques.