As some of you have previously mentioned, we have seen an increase in the amount of spam on MaplePrimes over the past few months. We recently took steps to improve it in a recent update that has so far proven helpful, and have also increased our behind-the-scenes efforts to proactively remove and block spam accounts.

Today we made a couple of additional minor changes to member profiles that should help further. Specifically, members can no longer enter HTML tags in the biography, 'technical interests/fields', and 'other interests' sections within their profiles. Spammers were co-opting these areas to create links back to their sites, and it is our hope that MaplePrimes will become much less attractive to them now that the capability has been removed.

In addition, we de-activated a large number of accounts (with 0 reputation) that were using these fields for spam. Prior to taking this action, we reviewed the records we were deactivating, and did not see any evidence of legitimate members. However, there is a small chance that we blocked a legitimate account in the process of doing this. If this has occurred to you, please accept my apologies and send an e-mail to custservice@maplesoft.com and we will reactivate it quickly.