Spammers

On Christmas day a number of entries were made on the Pterosaur Database on-line species list.  287 in fact.  They were all random text characters and links to drug sales websites, selling sex aids and other erotica.  Someone had been entering and pasting data manually, as this is the only way the website will accept entries on-line.  What kind of person would spend Christmas Day in this way?

These entries were deleted as soon as they were noticed and we have now updated the entry page to reject any links to E-mail or websites.  Data can still be added to the on-line site,but if a link of any kind is entered, the page will fail to write to the database.  I am please that I made the on-line database read only and installed a parallel entry database.  If such entries had been made directly to the full database, It may have been months before it was noticed.

The same modifications have been made to the Bibliography database uploader and the tests have worked well, so this type of spamming will be less likely in future.