Spammers

Can someone explain all the weird posts on the forum?

Who, Why, How and why don't RW do something about it?

«1

Comments

  • I don't understand the recent ones as they don't post links just repeat sentences.........

    not sure why

    but it is annoying me to the point I keep logging off
  • It is really doing my head in.

    They are starting to take over!!!

  • Stevie  GStevie G ✭✭✭✭

    it is annoying me to the point i keep logging off

    image

  • My guess is that someone somewhere is working on a spambot, and they're letting it play with the RW forums as a way of refining it. I run another set of music related forums and we now have to physically vet all new accounts because over 90% are created by automated spambots. Trouble is they're getting better and better at making the accounts more realistic.
  • I can see it must be very time consuming for the admin people at RW - I'm sure the forum isn't their main job.

    I don't see why they don't let a couple of users have access to delete accounts though. These are very obvious spammers - they just copy a line or two of what's already been said on the thread.

    Oh hang on - thats like 70% of us anyway.....
  • It's odd that they've not spammed the Groundhog Day thread... image
  • There's loads of spam messages even in the Website bugs section.

    The spammers normally use an invisible link to a site. A couple of times they've fecked up and posted the link to the site. I took a screenshot and sent of that and sent it to the company that hosts the spammers domain. 

  • Great fast response from dreamhost. They've pointed out the website owner may not be involved in the spam but they are still going to investigate further. 

  • What the hell is a spambot!

  • A spambot is a piece of software that automatically surfs the web looking for forums or other suitable sites where is can post spam messages. Some of them are new extremely complex and competant.

    Wikipedia definition here

    They're very difficult to block because they are constantly evolving and they're very good at spoofing their IP addresses, covering their tracks etc. A lot of the ones we block on the forums I run are picked up because they screw up filling in the mandatory data we ask for, often because English is not their first language. If they start to get that right then it can become very difficult to spot them sometimes as we've still had a few get through being manually checked, having their IP traced and all their details looked up on http://www.stopforumspam.com. As an example, of the last 20 new registrations we've had in the last few days so far we've rejected 17, and I have doubts about one of the remaining 3. I'm just giving it a couple of days to see if it pops up on the spammers list before aproving it or not.

  • Stevie  GStevie G ✭✭✭✭

    Cripes BOTF, 17 out of 20 minimum as dodgy registrations.

    These spamming idiots need a beating

  • As my forums deal with a long-defunct band our level of new users is pretty low which probably means we have a higher percentage of spammers than more active forums. We also use proprietary forum software that is widely used on the web, so that probably makes us more of a target as well. With the RW forums being non-standard that probably exempts them from a lot of the spambots, but never underestimate how persistant the spammers can be once they've found you. There is after all huge money to be made from successful spamming.
  • BOTF what do our current spammers stand to gain though? They're just reposting lines from other posts, nit trying to sell anything.........I must be missing something obvious.
  • Saffy - they are trying to get links to their site. It helps get them a better result on search engines.

    Fair play to Dreamhost - they've actually written to the owner of the account, informed them of my complaintand reminded them that spamming is not acceptable. That's great customer service.  It may not even make a difference but at least they've tried to do something. 

  • Stevie  GStevie G ✭✭✭✭
    What doesn't make sense is the question, who has ever bought anything off a spam email?
  • The spammers actually only need a tiny proportion of people to click through to make money. Certainly when e-mail spam was at its peak I saw articles implying they only needed a response of something like 0.001% to make money, and that some of them were literally making millions of dollars out of it becaue they were sending 100's of millions of e-mails. A test was done in 2008 where a university hijacked a zombie network and sent out 350 million spam e-mails for a fake pharma site. They only got 28 attempted orders from that 350 million e-mails which doesn't sound much, but if they'd kept it going at the level of spam that was around at the time it would have been enough for them to make $2million per year.The same probably applies here but on a lesser scale. The simple fact is that once the software is written it's costing them absolutely nothing to create all these posts, so hits they get from it are straight profit. That's assuming they're trying to sell something of course. I haven't clicked the link they're posting, but it's just as likely the site they're linking to actually contains something nasty that will try to install itself on your PC and the appearance of trying to sell you something is just a ruse.
  • But they aren't doing this for people to click through. They are only doing it to try and link to a website. That website will then probably redirect to another website. It may be a phishing activity, or it may be for links, or even both. This is probably a test activity.

    RW - if you read this, you or the tech team could paste any of these links into Wordpad and the link to the site shows up.
  • I'm disappointed in RW towers, and their lack of response to this thing. I know that RW has outsourced their web work, so I get that it costs them directly to make changes, and that changes don't necessarily come quickly, but the damage to the forums is beyond ridiculous.

    There are technical things that can be done without human intervention. The current wave of spammers are embedding an image in their posts, and all that would be needed would be to programmatically weed out postings with that image/host.

    There are also quirks to the html that the spammers kick out that would be easy to find.

    Another forum I use has a simple anti-spam button. If 5 people "mark this post as spam" then the post disappears and goes into a moderation queue.

    While I've been happy to report spammers in the past, I don't feel like RW is holding up their end of the bargain... for that reason, I'm just gonna abandon ship for a while and hope that they get their house in order. Sigh.

  • Stevie  GStevie G ✭✭✭✭

    Geez, just checked down the latest threads, and about 40-50 threads near the top of the lists have their last post written by a spammer!

    This is getting ridiculously out of hand now!

  • Agreed. It's getting silly. That said, though, the spammers are bringing back old threads and some of  them are good and I missed them first time round ... like the "Don't be this runner" thread on Clubhouse image
  • That's true, but it's annoying not being able to see which threads are actually being talked on

  • The site is supposed to be a commercial asset -- arguably more of an asset than the "dead trees" version of the magazine
  • Imagine if the magazine itself could be open to abuse from spammers.  So someone would write something, and this would merely be repeated a little bit further down the line.

    Oh no, hang on...

    image

  • brilliant

    it does sum up why the website is worth having and the paper magazine isn't really

  • Does Fetch suffer from this problem? I've not bothered to move across because I don't like the site design - too fussy and busy. But if RW is going to continue being swamped with spam I might have to.

    Or go without a running forum image

  • Not that RW and the 'tech team' seem to be doing much about this issue but RW have only responded on this thread Spam in Website bugs so if people post on there, RW may actually take notice of a few more posts.
Sign In or Register to comment.