We will soon add the following mountain chat rooms here, based on the mountain communities of:

Big Bear, California and surrounding mountain communities
Lake Arrowhead, California and surrounding mountain communities
Wrightwood, California and surrounding mountain communities

Please let us know what you think of our new Mountain Chat service. We want our online mountain chat room to be a positive, constructive, and safe experience for all of our members and visitors. Please share your thoughts by visiting our “Contact Us” page.

As a public school teacher I have seen first hand the positive empowerment and engagement resulting from students’ academic use of online tools, and as an online school teacher and administrator I can mention some of the studies that show that close to 50% of U.S. public school students will attend some form of online courses by 2019. Whether we use online publishing platforms to communicate,to learn, to teach, to share advice, to shop, sell, or purchase goods, to advertise our businesses or services, or to stay in touch with family members, friends, acquaintances, or colleagues, this trend is here to stay.

Sadly, there are numerous “dubious characters” on the internet who try to disrupt sites, or make a quick buck without regard of their actions. Such individuals may promise companies instant fame on the internet by bombarding free blog and forum hosting such as ours with “keyword-rich” advertising of various business without regard of the context of the online community they’re spamming. Wikipedia has some helpful information about spam and splogs as well (click on the links to access this).

In our case, we’ve received more than 25 spam blogs on this site alone in the last 24 hours. We manually deleted the splogs and identified the members who have created them as “spammers” and took additional actions to deny them future access.

We currently have and use several powerful plugins which work as tools to combat comment spams and will discuss them further in our “Featured Plugins” posts category.

To learn more about the pervasive issue of splogs and comment spam and how blog owners are dealing with this here’s an online conversation that may shed further light into the problem: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/12496

Rest assured that we will remain diligent in combating spam and splogs. Should you come across something that resembles a spam or splog on our site, please let us know so that we can “take a look.”
We welcome your questions on this topic as well as constructive comments bellow.

Thank you,
Elvis aka MaestroSersea, MountainBlogs.info Founder and Webmaster

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