Inside LabourStart

UnionBook suffered its first spam attack today, as reported to me by a number of users – and which I spotted myself as I received quite a bit of the spam. I immediately shut down the account and banned the spammer. I posted a notice on top of UnionBook explaining what happened. I will be emailing everyone who wrote to me about this.

But how did this happen in the first place?

We approve every new member of UnionBook by hand – and if someone doesn’t put in a genuine union name, we block them. In some cases, the people may be genuinely interested in UnionBook, but it’s supposed to be for trade unionists, so to prevent spammers we have been extra cautious and basically kept out everyone who didn’t seem to be real.

In this case, I believe the spammer managed to put in a genuine union name when registering and was approved.

Remember that the approval process also requires them to use a genuine email address and (I think) pass a CATCHA test as well.

All we can do is be even more careful in the future …