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Thread: Spam messages with links

  1. #1

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    Spam messages with links

    Help me understand this annoying phenomenon the forum experiences every weekend:

    1. Who are these people
    2. How do they repeatedly register as members
    3. Aren't the mods getting sick-and-tired of delegating those junk posting

    ???

  2. #2
    Jac@stafford.net's Avatar
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    Re: Spam messages with links


  3. #3

    Join Date
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    Re: Spam messages with links

    Oh, and I meant 'deleting' but the spell corrector had its own mind made up on what I meant. DELETING, as in what a mod needs to do with the spam link that was just posted moments ago!

  4. #4
    Moderator Ralph Barker's Avatar
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    Re: Spam messages with links

    Quote Originally Posted by BrianShaw View Post
    Help me understand this annoying phenomenon the forum experiences every weekend:

    1. Who are these people
    2. How do they repeatedly register as members
    3. Aren't the mods getting sick-and-tired of delegating those junk posting

    ???
    1. Presumably, they are people who are being paid by someone to post this stuff on as many forums as they can.

    2. By going to the trouble of filling out the registration form.

    3. Yep, you betcha, as they say up north. We filter new registrations, and while a dozen or two get rejected every day, a few don't match the filter criteria, and get through. We've considered various methods of reducing it further, but zapping them when they post is the easiest. This adds them to the database so they can't register again with the original parameters. Thus, they have to go to considerable trouble to re-register and post again, only to have the new post deleted within a few minutes.

  5. #5
    Moderator
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    Re: Spam messages with links

    We haven't had time to investigate them all, but I can report that a block of IP addresses for these spammers that I looked at when the current storm started traced to Bangladesh.

  6. #6
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    Re: Spam messages with links

    ...as did the one I just swatted. But the mastermind, whoever it is, could be anywhere.

  7. #7
    8x10, 5x7, 4x5, et al Leigh's Avatar
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    Re: Spam messages with links

    Quote Originally Posted by Oren Grad View Post
    I can report that a block of IP addresses for these spammers that I looked at when the current storm started traced to Bangladesh.
    Realize that blocking a single IP address can block millions of legitimate users.

    That might have worked 20-30 years ago.
    It definitely does not work today.

    - Leigh
    If you believe you can, or you believe you can't... you're right.

  8. #8
    Moderator
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    Re: Spam messages with links

    My wife recently watched a video by some idiot sales woman who was recruiting people to post streaming links. They didn't say where, but the recruits are paid by the click-through so it pays them to post as many as possible. I showed her what we are dealing with, but until I did, she didn't understand the problem.

    Leigh, if someone is rejected because of their IP address, they can contact us for advice on how to register with a differentIP address. I can't recall a single case of that (maybe there was one), though we have had one case where a person's email address showed up in the Stop Forum Spam database. We get contacted all the time by people who try to log in with Hotmail addresses, which became so spam-ridden that we reject the whole domain. Most just get a gmail address and try again. No indication yet that millions are trying to get in and aren't able.

    For now, we just keep playing whack-a-mole.

    Rick "rarely faster at it than Quick-Draw McGrad, however" Denney

  9. #9
    Eric Woodbury
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    Re: Spam messages with links

    If a newbie couldn't post for 24 hours, would that drive away anybody except these spammers? Or don't allow posted links in the beginning, but that would be probably a software change.

  10. #10
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    Re: Spam messages with links

    Quote Originally Posted by Eric Woodbury View Post
    If a newbie couldn't post for 24 hours, would that drive away anybody except these spammers? Or don't allow posted links in the beginning, but that would be probably a software change.
    Doubt it. We had a rash of spammers a while back who joined, posted a few vacuous messages, and then came back in a month to post spam in the FS forums. Those were mostly from South Asia, as I recall.

    This needs to hit the streaming sites so they lose the incentive to pay people to post links. I don't know how to do that, but all the scams seem to lose interest after a while.

    Rick "restricting links is hard" Denney

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