Spamming and Naughty Children

Edit: this was originally posted in response to this thread, but later split-off to form a new thread and moved to this board.

 

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Hi all,

 

Thank you for your patience - it was inconvenient for me to address this matter at the time.

 

I do not intend to describe the whole back-history here, but will provide those newer to the forum a description of this minor irritation. Most of you are probably aware that there has been a delusional blogger targeting our forum since we banned his account last summer. He attempted to use our forum as part of his targeting of members of another online benzodiazepine support forum. When challenged, he sought to intimidate me and our community by threatening retaliation if I banned or curtailed his activities. I was not remotely intimidated, banned his account, but in a rare instance of honesty, the abusive blogger was true to his word and retaliated by targeting our forum and members.

 

It is important to understand that although he 'targets' BB and its members, he's very ineffectual. Last night is a case in point. This 'abusive blogger' and a couple of helpers conspired to spam the forum with disturbing images and abusive text. The images mostly revolved around photoshopped nude imagery of Prof. Ashton  (a lady in her eighties), and some of me. I'm sure a psychologist would have a lot to say about the creator of these images and those that enjoy them. I just take these images for what they are: puerile, creepy, and revealing of the abusive blogger, C and and Donna's inner-most thoughts. I suggest they would be wiser to keep those kind of thoughts to themselves.

 

The account used to post the abuse and spam was 'Bella10'. We've long known that this account was created and used by Donna (Dukesmommy, DMP, amongst other names at BB). Donna was the owner of another (now defunct) 'benzodiazepine support forum', but was actually involved in the abusive activities of the abusive blogger all along. She would secretly post at his blog under the names of NT and Military Tanks, amongst other noms de guerre.

 

The person that actually spammed our forum was 'C'. Some of you will know that he's a long-time co-conspirator-abuser of the blogger. Donna, the other long-time co-conspirator-abuser, provided 'C' with the login details to her Bella10 account.

 

Hope1962 (Senior Admin) and I received the following PM from Bella10 ('C' and Donna) last night:

 

By the way, I don't know what Mr. fifty 9 is talking about when he says "WE" have sleeper cells. I'm sure he does have them here but this is between you and I.  There is no WE in this conversation.

 

Donna has created many sock/fake accounts, here at BB, at the abusive blogger's site, and at pissedconsumer.com. Donna, if you wish to stop being embarrassed like this, I suggest that you stop outing yourself and do something more productive. In short, grow up.

 

 

Edit: fixed broken link.

Thank you for the explanation Colin!  It is so sad that your time has to be spent on dealing with these crazies but thank you again for working so hard to keep this forum the great support that it is!

As Colin states, as much as these "crazies" try to cause problems, they've not succeed. They might cause a small bump, like spamming the forum,   but that takes about 5 minutes to clean up..and it makes them look childish.

The opening post to this thread (and intervening replies) were originally posted to this Feedback thread:

 

http://www.benzobuddies.org/forum/index.php?topic=63684.0

 

It was decided that this deserved to be its own topic.

 

Thanks.

As Hope has brought up to me prior.... this particular individual is really not worth my time but, I do appreciate the explanation.  Thank you both for your hard work and effort.  The forum is an amazing resource to help people deal with a tough time in thier lives.  Am I allowed to say "Screw the haters"...lol, Jess

As Hope has brought up to me prior.... this particular individual is really not worth my time but, I do appreciate the explanation.  Thank you both for your hard work and effort.  The forum is an amazing resource to help people deal with a tough time in thier lives.  Am I allowed to say "Screw the haters"...lol, Jess

 

I think you just did, Jess. 

Once again thank you for keeping this site safe for all of us here, it must take so much of your time to deal with this  pathetic little person but we all do appreciate it, you are helping so many people with your forum, too bad the posters didn't get the help they  needed

LG

Preface:  This post will reflect my generational ignorance about the cyberworld that has taken over human communication.  I realize that our constitution protects our freedom of speech et al....and I suspect you have explored all aspects of this destructive annoying issue.

 

Is there any way Google and other search engines could or would remove/ban C. so when someone taps in Benzodiazepines those awful sites do not come up?   

 

 

 

Hi New Life,

 

I should say first that this is an international forum owned and operated by a UK citizen. I just wanted to make it clear that the US consituation, really doesn't fully play into this although I do understand your point.

 

In answer to your question about Google; from what I understand they do not edit search results in any way.

 

Hope

Thank you Colin, i really dont know what i would have done without this site, Thank you too Hope and each and everyone of the volunteers that keep this site safe, we truly need more people like all of you...   xx Moe

Hello Colin & All Of the "Team"!!

 

Words cannot express my gratitude for this "God Send" FORUM. The amount of time you all spend, VOLUNTEERING

countless hours of your time & the dedication to keeping this forum running smoothly is truly remarkable, &

appreciated very much. Some how some way I will "pay it forward".

 

May God Bless you ALL & this WONDERFUL FORUM.

 

THANK YOU ALL SO VERY MUCH

 

Sincerely,

 

Joe

Hello liljoe,

 

Thank you for the kind words. I think I speak for the whole team that we are honored and privileged to give back to a site that has been a lifeline for us. Being able to help others also helps us.

 

pianogirl

Thank you Moe!  We are happy to be here and to help those suffering because of benzos and withdrawal. I'm right with you, I would be a lost little soul without BB.

 

pianogirl

Thanks everyone. It's our pleasure.

Thank you everyone for your kind words.

 

It is a pleasure to help with keeping this forum running as smoothly as possible.

 

 

 

I see that the CoM page has been suspended.

LG

I don't think so lg.  Just saw that I have become a target there!

It was down for a few hours.

 

sarafina,

 

Please don't worry about the abusive blogger. He's an idiot with way too much time on his hands. No one reads his pathetic blog. Any comments you see on there are him, pretending to be other people. The only people that read it are people who stumble across it. Frankly, we should pity him. He's alone, he sits on his computer all day scraping content from internet forums. He has no one. All he has is the knowledge that he's upsetting you. Don't give him the satisfaction of that.

 

We suggest you ignore him. Don't give him any power over you or your recovery. He's not worth a second thought. We also suggest you not visit his blog but if you do, please be sure to use a proxy.

 

Hope

Proxy?  I am a little freaked now.  What do you mean?  And how do you know who this guy is?!!!

If you read Colin's first post on this thread...

 

He's an ex-member who was banned. He has a history on this forum of being a pain in the neck.

 

A proxy hides your IP address when you visit a site. You can find them on the internet. He can't find out any important information about you from your IP address but why give him any more info than you need to.

 

Trust me when I say, he's not worth being freaked about.

Thank you Hope!

What a creep!!!!!!!!!!!!

Was he responsible for those creepy pictures?

Yes, sarafina. He's done that before but we're pretty fast when he does and delete them quickly. I can have one of our developers explain about proxies...etc.

 

Trust me, there is nothing to be worried about. I'll have JackSparrow, our dev guy post here to explain things better than I could.

Hello all,

 

I'm Jack Sparrow one of the developers on this forum. Hope is right when she says not to worry about this guy. As long as you're anonymous on the forum, i.e. don't give out any personal information to anyone via PM or on the open forum. I'll explain a little about what a proxy is.

 

For those of you who prefer to know as little about technical stuff as possible:

 

In layman's terms, think of a proxy as a friend of yours that handles all your communications with someone else. Except the friend is just some server on the internet.

 

For those of you who are more technically inclined:

 

A proxy server serves as an intermediary communication device. Normally when you communicate with a server, all communication between your computer/laptop/iphone are routed through a bunch of servers that ultimately ends up at the site you requested. This provides the servers of that site with a little bit about you, such as, general geographic area, (i.e. west coast or east coast etc.), the browser you are using and a few other more technical details. This allows the server to properly craft a response for any communication to be more tailored to what you require.

 

The majority of that information happens so fast, nobody can really keep up. Every so often though you may want to visit a site where you don't want that information leaked. How do you do that? Well there are a lot of ways but the most common is to use proxy server that handles all your communications with the remote server for you. So you make a request to the proxy server, which in turn makes a request to the remote server, and then returns all the relevant information back to the proxy server, which in turn relays it back to you.

 

In other words it becomes like a complicated game of telephone. It's really a lot more complicated than that. And has a lot to do with routing tables and IP addresses.

 

If you have any other questions I'd be happy to answer them for you to assuage any fears or concerns you might have.

 

Edit: typo

Thank you!

Hello Jack -

 

Thanks for all of the technical support!

 

If you are ever looking for an apprentice I'm in!

 

You guys do some awesome "behind the seens" stuff & your time & commitment is invaluable

 

Joe