About 8 months ago, we set up a forum for posting
questions/answers/discussion about Grants.gov.  About 200 people signed
up, it was used enthusiastically for a couple of months, and has since
received little attention.

Http://orsa.uoregon.edu/grants.gov/forums

Recently, we noticed a high volume of spam, nonsense traffic and
subscriptions from Germany and Eastern Europe.

We've temporarily shut the system down and are trying to decide what to
do about it.

Some Options:

1) eliminate the forum

2) Put a generic password, like "NCURA" on the forum. Something that you
all would have a reasonable expectation to remember, but our spamming
friends won't get.

3) Require authenticated signups (We really don't have the FTE here @
University of Oregon to support this)

4) Restrict access to those with .edu; .gov; .mil; others? In their
e-mail address.

*) Put forums for more topics on our website. What topics would you like
to see?

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Basically, we are doing this because we can. We host and develop
applicatins on our own web-server and database server. The forum
application is public domain, and requires very little attention from us
as technicians or adminstrators.

After National, I asked for a link to be put up on the NCURA ERA
Neighborhood; that may take a while. This would be one possible method
for keeping the forum on the tips of our fingers and as a tool for
discussions.

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Feel free to respond to me individually.

Steve Shapiro
Office of Research Services and Administration
University of Oregon
5219 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403

o) 541-346-0720
f) 541-346-5138
main) 541-346-5131

xxxxxx@orsa.uoregon.edu

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