Thread: FYI SPAM posts this morning

For all of you who missed the original content of the half dozen ads posted this morning by a new user "chris4adm", they were all the same ad... basically selling a variety of electronic equipment... (xboxes, computers, etc.).

There's no sure fire way to stop these ers from attempting to spam us. We've tightened up the registration process so it can't (easily) be automated... hence we've cut off the spammers who use software to register. But there's little defense against a live human who registers and decides to post since there's no way to tell if they're "friend or foe" until they actually post and reveal their intentions.

As soon as a Mod sees SPAM, we'll continue banning the member and either deleting the ads or editing out the content.

So far we've only had a handful, so lets hope it stays that way.

Thanks Joe. This was the first time I needed to use the "Ignore User" list, I'm glad this guy is outta here.

Just so you know Joe... The section titles can act as magnets for spam peddlars. "Buy/Sell/Trade", "Vendor's Corner", and "Auction Talk" probably were the ones that initially snagged this morning's spammer. We don't have a "Technical Support" section, but I've seen boards that do and it seems to draw spammers like flies.

Originally Posted by Scrapyard Ape

section titles can act as magnets for spam...

I understand, but we need titles that mean something to our community, so it's a catch-22. Apparently another Mod deleted the posts, but they were in non-magnet forums as well... eg, "Hones". We really haven't had much of a problem along these lines so far.

If spam gets significantly worse, I'll probably change it so new members to have to have their first few posts "moderated", meaning a Mod will have to approve the post before it becomes visible to others. I certainly don't look forward to having to do that, however.

We could have a prohibition on posting in the BST forum before you get to a certain number of posts. If there are for sale ads in other forums, then they should be routinely deleted.

I deleted the posts. I was under the impression SPAM could be "physically removed" as it has absolutely no value. The (L)user was already banned by another mod when I saw the stuff.

So far as spam goes, we have practically no problem with it. I am a mod on a telecom-related forum, and we were seeing (on average) over 125 posts per day on the weekend, and over 75 on a weekday. This has been curbed a bit by the admin, but still a huge pain in the ass for everyone.

I didn't even notice. Well done gents.

X

We've got the same problem at Tradtalk.com and most of ours could be filtered if I could find the right hook point and wrote a script that would bypass successful registraiton of anyone with "Man" as the "hobby/Interest". But I haven't dug in deep enough to do that. To keep the spamming SOB's from catching on, it would have to proceed as if it really was registering them and issue no errors at all.

We get blasted with these bastages regularly and every board has been. 2006 was a banner year for spamming message boards. I think that it really doesn't have anything to do with getting customers from the message board, but rather, parasitically using the message board to register a "link" to their site and if the search engines pick it up before it's deleted, they're successful.