Unwanted junk email, most commonly known as spam, is an irritant at best and a major security risk in its most malicious forms.

Traditionally spam is associated with email, but the proliferation of social media sites have opened up a whole new channel for the underbelly of the Internet to blast out unwanted, inappropriate messages.

At CanadaOne we have been dealing with a spammer like this recently on our Facebook page.

The company in question is boringly repetitive: each post (or comment on one of our posts) appears as “Company name – Call (phone number) weblink.

When the first few posts came through, we would simply report them as spam and block the user. The problem that has developed is that if one user account was blocked, another one would be used, with a different link but the same phone number.

Our demand that the company stop spamming our page, which was sent using the contact form on the company’s website, was ignored. It was hardly a surprise to find that the actual owner of their domain names was blocked by the Domains by Proxy service.

To this company I have a single thing to say: Shame.

What are some of the ways you can help prevent spam on your Facebook Page? There are a few options.

First, open the admin panel of your Facebook Page (this will now appear at the top of your timeline, which is the page that opens by default ). Then select Manage > Edit Page and click on the Manage Permissions tab if you are not taken there directly.

• You can now change the availability of posting and tagging, by checking or unchecking the appropriate box.
• You can also control whether posts by others are automatically shown or hidden on the Timeline of your Page.
• The Moderator Block list option lets you add a string of keywords that will cause a post to be marked as spam.
• You can also set-up restrictions based on a Facebook user's home country.
• It is also helpful to enable email notifications, which you will find under the Your Settings tab, so that you are notified when people post, comment on or send a message to your page.

Facebook has a tendency to change the way its interface works, so be prepared for some of these options to change in the future.

As for the spammer that triggered this article, we are hardly going to mention them by name, which would only give them more free publicity.

Revenge, as they say, is a dish best served cold.

So we have decided to take a different approach.

We have deleted all listings for the company in CanadaOne's free business directory. At the same time, we decided to give a shout-out to their competitors to say “thank you” for not spamming us. Here is a list of just some of those companies:

A Step Beyond Credit & Debt Solutions
http://www.astepbeyond.ca/

Credit Debt Consolidation Settlement Solutions and Services Burnaby
http://www.iamdebtfree.com/

4 Pillars Debt Relief
http://www.4pillars.ca/

A Farber & Partners Financial Professionals and Bankruptcy Trustees
http://www.afarber.com/

André Gabbay & Associés Inc .
http://agabbayetassocies.com/

NoMoreDebts
http://www.nomoredebts.org/

Debt Options Canada
http://debtoptionscanada.com/

Debt Free Canada
http://www.debtfree-canada.ca/

These listings are from CanadaOne’s free Canadian business directory. You can find more like this by browsing results for the search "debt settlement".

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