I first posted over two months ago about the fact that I’d been digging around in Rails forum software and discovered that beast.caboo.se was loaded with spam. I notified both of them via email, while I recieved a reply from Josh, over 2 months later and still nothing has been done about the spam. Beast has now been replaced by ’Altered Beast’ as the forum to use (since Beast is pre rails 2.0). Never the less the official beast forum still shows up high in the search rankings on google.

Whatever respect I had for Josh Grobel and Rick Olsen aka Technoweenie is now gone. Josh argued that the forum isn’t used anymore. My response to that would be to delete the spam and lock the forums so you don’t have to deal with it anymore. I know everyone is on limited time, but it clearly reflects badly on them when sex sites are advertised on their forums and yet they do nothing about it.

Why don’t they care? 15 minutes of one of their time and the problem would be gone.

If you look down the page a bit you will notice that I was having a go at the beast forum for allowing spam to remain on the site for a while (its still there). I looked at my own blog today only to realise that I’d got spammy comments and not realised. I’ve now tightened the filtering and made it so that comments have to be moderated before posting, which is fine because I’m not exactly overflowing with comments. Anyway, I got the metaphysical slap on the hand for being uppity.

I guess I should be at least somewhat flattered that my blog has been found by someone, even if that someone just wants to write meaningless garbage in my comments.

beast.caboo.se is just loaded with spam.

Which is a shame because it shows the flaws of an otherwise great little application. For those that don’t know beast is a small forum implementation done in ruby on rails, some really nice features in ~500 lines of code. Sadly it doesn’t deal adequately with the realities of the internet. My problem isn’t so much that spam got posted, its that no-one has bothered to clean it off. If you’re going to run a forum you have a responsibility to ensure that it is maintained. If you can’t do it all yourself find some additional volunteers to help moderate the content, or develop a plugin to filter spam.

UPDATE: I notified both of them via email, while I recieved a reply from Josh, over 2 months later and still nothing has been done about the spam. Whatever respect I had for Josh Grobel and Rick Olsen aka Technoweenie is now gone. Josh argued that the forum isn’t used anymore. My response to that would be to delete the spam and lock the forums so you don’t have to deal with it anymore.