Hey look, it's spamday!

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MatGB
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Hey look, it's spamday!

#1 Post by MatGB »

Seriously, rarely see it here and today, loads, spam filter needs updating?
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AndrewW
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#2 Post by AndrewW »

MatGB wrote:Seriously, rarely see it here and today, loads, spam filter needs updating?
It's not just here. Seeing it a lot on another forum as well, some of the same spam. But I can do something about it on that forum. (At least ban/delete anyways).

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eleazar
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#3 Post by eleazar »

i'll get it.

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eleazar
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#4 Post by eleazar »

what i find most disheartening is that there are enough people that follow the links that get spammed on forums for it to be worth the scoundrel's time to make spambots, and for people to pay for their use.

AndrewW
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#5 Post by AndrewW »

eleazar wrote:what i find most disheartening is that there are enough people that follow the links that get spammed on forums for it to be worth the scoundrel's time to make spambots, and for people to pay for their use.
Agreed.

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MatGB
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#6 Post by MatGB »

99% of spambots don't care if you follow the link directly, they're trying to trick search engines into giving them higher rankings—I used to do some white hat SEO/SEM stuff and the spammers and idiots and tricksters gave the whole process a bad name (plus, I wasn't very good and nearly went bust, but, y'know...)

Google has changed their algorithms a lot to try to reduce spam effectiveness (which is one of the reasons it's important to delete the stuff), but other search engines still play catchup and even Google isn't able to stay ahead of the game constantly.
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eleazar
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#7 Post by eleazar »

MatGB wrote:99% of spambots don't care if you follow the link directly, they're trying to trick search engines into giving them higher rankings—I used to do some white hat SEO/SEM stuff and the spammers and idiots and tricksters gave the whole process a bad name (plus, I wasn't very good and nearly went bust, but, y'know...)

Google has changed their algorithms a lot to try to reduce spam effectiveness (which is one of the reasons it's important to delete the stuff), but other search engines still play catchup and even Google isn't able to stay ahead of the game constantly.
That actually makes me feel better about humanity.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#8 Post by Geoff the Medio »

eleazar wrote:That actually makes me feel better about humanity.
That people are evil, not stupid? (For an appropriate value of evil...)

yandonman
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#9 Post by yandonman »

More like those evil people remind me of some of my friends....
http://xkcd.com/1139/


If the community clicks "spam" on a poster enough time, does the forum automatically prevent them from spamming? (or does it just notify an admin?)
Code released under GPL 2.0. Content released under GPL 2.0 and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#10 Post by Geoff the Medio »

yandonman wrote:If the community clicks "spam" on a poster enough time, does the forum automatically prevent them from spamming? (or does it just notify an admin?)
As far as I can see, it just puts a warning icon next to the thread when I click view new posts. I'd likely have seen the post anyway, though the icon might remove some potential ambiguity, though it also might add ambiguity if a spam post that did a relatively good job at pretending to be not spam didn't get flagged. I think there's also a reports list somewhere, but I rarely ever see or use it.

AndrewW
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#11 Post by AndrewW »

Geoff the Medio wrote:I think there's also a reports list somewhere, but I rarely ever see or use it.
For the phpBB one I'm a moderator for reports are under Moderator Control panel.

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Geoff the Medio
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#12 Post by Geoff the Medio »

The persistence and frequency of spam account registrations and postings has gotten to the point that I've had to bump up the registration captcha difficulty. Apologies to those who have trouble with it, but I / we can't be spending literally hours a day cleaning up the spam posts.

AndrewW
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#13 Post by AndrewW »

Geoff the Medio wrote:The persistence and frequency of spam account registrations and postings has gotten to the point that I've had to bump up the registration captcha difficulty. Apologies to those who have trouble with it, but I / we can't be spending literally hours a day cleaning up the spam posts.
Don't blame you there, did the same thing myself awhile back on another forum.

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eleazar
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#14 Post by eleazar »

Geoff the Medio wrote:
eleazar wrote:That actually makes me feel better about humanity.
That people are evil, not stupid? (For an appropriate value of evil...)
That a smaller number of people are evil rather than a larger number of people are stupid.

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MatGB
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Re: Hey look, it's spamday!

#15 Post by MatGB »

The proof of the stupid is email spam, that requires people actually falling for it.

Scarily, the old Nigerian advance fee fraud thing predates email, used to get letters, paid for stamps and everything, running the exact same scam back when I ran a shop, addressed to the business that had gone bust before we took up residence, they obviously worked from an old companies register or something.

If they were paying for actual stamps and postage, that means people fell for it even more back then.
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Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

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