News submission feature disabled for now

In the last 48 hours, this website has received 2,000 news submissions. Normally that'd be great; I could take the rest of the year off at that rate, but all 2,000 of them were spam messages for that certain male ED drug that starts with a V.

It's been a fascinating project to track this activity. I've been monitoring what I think are zombie PCs from all over the world submitting these spam messages to SCVTalk. I'm getting hit from Montevideo, Melbourne, Amsterdam, Beijing, and Pretoria, South Africa. PCs in these different areas are submitting hundreds of news stories, completely overwhelming the news submission feature and making it useless. Blocking this activity by denying access to the website is like playing Wack-a-Mole at Mountasia: it can't be done. The spammers are evil geniuses, and once the SCVTalk news submission URL was broadcast to the zombie PCs, it's game over. Last night, I must have blocked every user from the nation of South Africa from visiting SCVTalk, and I think all of Uruguay can't get to my website now either. Such is the nature of blocking by IP addresses. Oh, and for your Mac fans....yes, the offending PCs all run Windows, many of them XP or 2000 boxes with Internet Explorer 6. Big surprise. So I've disabled the "Submit your News" link for now, until I can figure out how to implement an intelligent solution to the problem (like a CAPTCHA system). One of the main benefits of having the "Submit your News" link was that you could submit news to this site anonymously. I never made a promise to publish everything that was sent, but if it was written well, I usually published it. That feature is gone for now, but you can still email me at jeff at scvtalk.com. Confidentiality is assured.