SD on 16/12/2006 at 23:32
I know we're not supposed to post in spam threads because it makes the spam problem worse, but someone on another forum asked me how replying to spam threads makes the problem worse, and I realised I didn't actually know the exact mechanics of that.
Well, I'm kind of keen to respond knowledgeably to this fellow who doubts my Internet Mastery.... so, umm, how does replying to spam threads make the problem worse? Much thanks.
Ajare on 17/12/2006 at 00:06
Apparently, some spam posts have some invisible image embedded, to make it possible to track how many times the post has been viewed. So if everyone clicks on it, Mr Spammer sees that it's a popular thread, and targets the forum more.
However, I've never actually seen a spam post do this.
David on 17/12/2006 at 09:24
Ajare is right, however not many spam bots do that any more, but it does happen occasionally.
There are two main types of spam we get here. There are the ones that contain a link to a website and there are ones advertising phones / mp3 players / consoles in big lists.
The former type is not targeting the users of the forum, but is targeting the popularity of the forum in search engines, basically the more times the message appears and is crawled by search bots the higher up the search rankings the site linked to in the spam will be.
In theory, they'd have to be spamming quite a lot of sites for this to have any major effect, but judging by the number of spammers we get it's not inconceivable.
The second type is targeting the users. Having watched these ones quite a lot it appears that they post one or two threads and then go back and forth between them once every minute or so. I believe they are looking for changes in the thread that would indicate that it has been replied to and would target the forum more than one that gets no replies.
And finally replying to a spam thread bumps it to the top of the listings in the forums and therefore puts it into the Last Post column. Most of the popular forums for spammers appear at the top of the listing and this means that one of the first things new users see is PHONEZ 4 SALE. I don't know about anybody else, but that would put me off using a forum.
Gestalt on 17/12/2006 at 23:06
Have you considered having the forum software automatically add rel="nofollow" to outbound links posted by New Members, assuming that's possible? It seems to discourage the first type of spammer, but there might be a downside I don't know about.
zombe on 18/12/2006 at 07:00
I think it does that already.
(
http://www.ee) test - don't bother to click
edit:
What the hell ... it doesn't !?
David on 18/12/2006 at 07:10
In a previous version I added it but it made no difference whatsoever, so I didn't bother with any newer versions.
AxTng1 on 24/12/2006 at 18:41
Related to the whole spammer thing:
I was trying to improve NWN2 performance so I was browsing various forums. (
http://vnboards.ign.com/site_news/b23044/99820024/p1) IGN seemed useful to begin with but look what happens near the start of page 2.
This seems to be getting more common, I mean wtf...
What exactly is to gain by carrying on 5 pages of conversation with yourself with anonymous logins?
Jeshibu on 24/12/2006 at 19:43
They've even got apathetic spambots. :weird:
