A note on spam

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A note on spam

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Topic: A note on spam (Read 1362 times)

meep-eep
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A note on spam
« on: January 01, 2013, 02:17:02 pm »

For quite a while now, spammers have been employing less obvious tricks to spam the forum.
No longer do they directly put their spam in a posting, but they instead use the signature, or the 'website' link in the user profile.
What these spammers are interested in is not directly advertising wares, but to raising the search rankings of the sites linked to.
The UQM forum is probably one of many, so the spammers do not realise that I have employed various measures to prevent profiles from being indexed by search engines, making the latter pointless.

So spam accounts keep being created, and they are usually deleted within half a day before anyone notices them. I examine each newly created account, and I have semi-automated the process of banning spammers / deleting accounts, so it takes me less than a second to ban one. (I just have to type 'banspammer <name>' in my shell.)

The reason that I'm posting this, is that occasionally, one slips through the cracks. It has happened that a user is created, without any spam in the profile, and that only months later, the profile is changed.
Sometimes an seemingly innocuous posting is made, presumably with the idea of later changing the signature. There are basically two forms in which these postings appear: 1) a generic remark such as "Interesting." is posted. The spammers can use the same remark on any forum, and can hence automate this. 2) a previous response to a topic (usually the first one) is reposted later on in an active thread. Again, the spammers can automate this.
I want to ask you to report these postings if you see them. It is not always clear if such a posting is spam, but I will do a bit of additional investigation if needed. If it is a new account, it is probably spam. If in doubt, I'll just delete the posting (which does not add anything to the thread in any case), while keeping the account around for the moment.


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Re: A note on spam
« Reply #1 on: January 02, 2013, 02:30:29 pm »

spammers shall be cleansed !


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Star Control Lives!

Re: A note on spam
« Reply #2 on: January 02, 2013, 02:33:33 pm »

Spam is always a problem. Just look at my stats for my blog:

It's insane! More than 95% of internet traffic is spam related! The majority of IPs are repeat spammers, so you can look it up on Project Honey Pot and see how often their IP comes up.

And I still get those e-mails about ad space and SEO optimizations. Sad


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