Thread: Banned users

wow i couldn't believe what i saw today .Some people want to hack this place ?Why and how many of them
Nonsense to me.
mostly names were starting with numbers

I think I am missing something. What is this about banned users?
The vast majority are spammers who get banned as soon as they are reported.

i was thinking spammers will leave us alone

Fat chance. I have never counted, but we catch at least 3 spammers per day.
I never understood it, but it was explained to me by Joe (ex-admin here).
Spammers don't care about the forums in which they are spamming, or even if the members ever click the links. That's not what spamming is about.

All websites big and small are crawled by search bots, indexing stuff, collecting links, and doing whatever it is that search bots do. This is what spammers are after.
Because if their spam posts stay online for even a minute, that post has been seen by a searchbot, and the links have been indexed.

And as the search bot indexes links, the search engine will rate them. If a link is encountered multiple times in different places, its relevance will be increased. This is the only thing the spammers care about: to increase the page ranking of the stuff fro which they are spamming. That we ban them and delete their posts doesn't matter to them.

So even though we ban spammers as soon as possible, they will come back and register a new account a day later or a week later, and post some more junk. It gets crawled by the itty-bitty spiders, it gets deleted, they get banned, ... Thus the cycle continues.

Well thats what I learned new today .....

thanks for the explination

Originally Posted by Bruno

Fat chance. I have never counted, but we catch at least 3 spammers per day.
I never understood it, but it was explained to me by Joe (ex-admin here).
Spammers don't care about the forums in which they are spamming, or even if the members ever click the links. That's not what spamming is about.

All websites big and small are crawled by search bots, indexing stuff, collecting links, and doing whatever it is that search bots do. This is what spammers are after.
Because if their spam posts stay online for even a minute, that post has been seen by a searchbot, and the links have been indexed.

And as the search bot indexes links, the search engine will rate them. If a link is encountered multiple times in different places, its relevance will be increased. This is the only thing the spammers care about: to increase the page ranking of the stuff fro which they are spamming. That we ban them and delete their posts doesn't matter to them.

So even though we ban spammers as soon as possible, they will come back and register a new account a day later or a week later, and post some more junk. It gets crawled by the itty-bitty spiders, it gets deleted, they get banned, ... Thus the cycle continues.

Yes, but you can make them stop. A friend of mine who used to run a vbulletin forum did that. Not sure how, but I'm sure the info can be found online easily.

Bruno thanks for the info. And this is different from people that try to scam members by selling stuff in the classifieds, right?

Al raz.

i know it has to be a hassle to deal with spammers on a daily basis and i know that is is a never ending battle so i tip my hat to all of those who keep srp clean and spam free. thank you

Originally Posted by Alraz

Bruno thanks for the info. And this is different from people that try to scam members by selling stuff in the classifieds, right?

Al raz.

Correct. Spammers are just trying to get noticed, whereas scammers in the classifieds try to sell junk razors for too much money with bad pics and descriptions.

Of those, there are a lot less. That happens rarely, and the seller usually sees the error of his ways when we explain things to him. Every now and again, someone shows up who just wants to sell razors without being an active member here. Those people are simply tossed out if they don't want to become active members here. But as I said, that doesn't happen often.

Originally Posted by Cornelius

Yes, but you can make them stop. A friend of mine who used to run a vbulletin forum did that. Not sure how, but I'm sure the info can be found online easily.

Joe looked into it before he left.
Getting spammers out (or rather, prevening them from coming in) can be done in several ways generally:
1) have the first couple of posts approved by a moderator before they can post at will.
2) have the registration approved by a mod, who will contact the new member if there is doubt
3) have some sort of filter that can determin if a post is spam or not.

1 and 2 are a significant burden on mods, but more importantly, it discourages genuine newbies.
3 is possible, but no such filters exist atm that I known of (or so I was told) and making it yourself requires changing the vbulletin code which is not that simple.

We already have several other spam prevention methods in place, but some still get through.