List Owners & Moderators FAQ

I have a group on Yahoo Groups. Lately there have been many spammers attempting to join and post their filth. Most of these spammers have adult profiles. Is there any way to exclude all adult profiles from joining?

Unfortunately there's not a way to prohibit certain types of profiles from joining.

Your best defense against spammers is the "Moderate New Members" feature, that way you can ban them on their first post.

If the spamming attempts get too bad, you might try setting your group to Restricted Membership for awhile and requesting an email reply before approving membership. Spammers never reply to those. Give real people a week or so to reply tho, some people only check or have access to their email once a week. Then for anyone who hasn't replied in two weeks, just reject their membership request.

Hey Texas Critter,

Thanks for the great site and most excellent reference.

I have a problem in one of my Yahoo!Groups that I have not run accross before and it has me a little confused. Several times over the past week myself and 3 of my moderators have had our emails changed to "No Mail" although we did not request this. In looking at the Group Activity / Email Commands, it shows that we have changed this setting but, none of has sent an email to change this setting... any ideas?

TIA,
Whyle

It's viruses. They pull both From and To addresses at random from an infected computer, both from email address books and from saved mail and from web pages in browser cache or temp files. You and your moderators are probably frequent posters which increases the odds of your addresses being picked by the virus on the infected user's computer.

There's nothing you can do to stop it except urge your list members to install and keep updated anti-virus software and a firewall on their computer. There's more info about that in the General Tips/Info section under Viruses, Spyware and Other Internet Monsters.