Forum Spam

[BedstorfromAP]

Twice today on 2 different Forum sites I have had to alert Admin to the Presence of Spammers who despite an Updated Registration (with CAPTCHA) Got By this as I theorise in this edited Posting I left on a closed forum for Admin to read (as well as the Normal alert channels)
[ QUOTE ]
Strange thing another known Spammer Popped up on **s other site today despite it being Harder to get in (on registration). I have told **, Easy to spot (this Time!) They were called ********** Add this name to the Blocklist too! Admin.
I think some of these spammers use a real person to open the door which is then Pointed towards the spambot to do the dirty!

Both of these originated in China despite claiming they were from nearer home on their Profile
If this is their New way of attacking forums and sites. We'll have to be more vigilant than ever before

[/ QUOTE ]

I hope this is not going to be a normal housekeeping job [img]/forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

TIP Their weak point is in the Screen-name selection If it Googles Lots of hits consider it a spammer and Warm Admin Pronto
NOTE I think its used often because their command of English is Not too good
Better English writers may rotate several names give a low Hit rate feedback thus making it even harder to detect [img]/forums/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img] Don't like the sound of that scenario [img]/forums/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

FYI The first spammer I detected made 31k hits The 2nd made 17200 hits [img]/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif[/img]

[bricat]

[ QUOTE ]
Forum Spammer Alert!

[/ QUOTE ]

don't panic, don't panic, We have hello_there to deal with spammers, she can smell them a mile away.

[Hello_There]

Sniff sniff [img]/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Mouse]

T'ain't no word of a lie either, chief.

[George]

I was quite amused by Mods replies on this, then on another popular forum I saw this posted.

"Over the past few months we have seen literally hundreds of new registrations from servers based in mainland China and parts of Eastern Europe. We've monitored these registrations, because we had our suspicions, and sure enough we're seeing an increase in the number of commercial spam postings - many of you will have noticed.

Of course there are things we could do, we could harvest out all registrations from particular locations for instance, but for obvious reasons we don't want to do that. Lots of perfectly genuine forum members come from China and Eastern European countries, and we have no intention of running blanket culls......so we're paying the price."

Does this kind of thing present a major problem here for you?

[bricat]

we get our fair share of them, but as i said earlier caroline does a brilliant job of spotting them straight away, and of course the members can play their part too, if they see any deliberate spam posts they can click on the notify moderator button.

[greysts]

George

Although this isn't a 'fully moderated forum' in the strict sense of the term there are enough of us around at most times of the day or night to squash them as soon as we see them.

Unless this other forum to which you refer is more proactive in stopping them it will eventually become unusable as all the other forum spammers in the world will see how easy it is to get their adverts on board and thus get a Google listing. Very short sighted.

As Brian says, Caroline spots most of them. We all have a laugh at some of the tricks these people get up to. The easist ones to spot are the ones who's first ever post on the forum starts off something like 'I've just been on to Google looking for [Nike trainers], [mobile phones], [cheap web hosting] and I found this stolen.goods@china.com I think it's great!!'

[George]

[ QUOTE ]




Unless this other forum to which you refer is more proactive in stopping them it will eventually become unusable as all the other forum spammers in the world will see how easy it is to get their adverts on board and thus get a Google listing. Very short sighted.



[/ QUOTE ]

PC Advisor the monthly mag's website is the Forum I refer to. Although it appears there's only a Forum Editor to police things they must have additional resources to keep the situation under control.

All very interesting.