Ethical forum spam.

Artashes · Post #1 (**permalink**) 09-25-2006, 11:20 PM

We all know there are occasional spammers here and there that would post the stuff they usually post, or send you by email: meds, cracked software, etc. But I have NEVER was exposed to spam that had this at the end of the forum post:

Quote:

P.S. 2admin,moderators:
If you want stop this click here

With an actual link to "Remove me from continuous spamming-your-board list"!! I was amazed! Wow! I give it an A+.

Definitely made my day!

We should be so thankful some of them are being so ethical in such difficult for them times.

Xcel_Hosting · Post #2 (**permalink**) 09-25-2006, 11:32 PM

I find that to be hilarious. There's always something that'll end up surprising you.

ldcdc · Post #3 (**permalink**) 09-26-2006, 08:57 AM

Hahaha! I notided that post as well. Forum spam that you can opt out of... or so they claim.

pmhoran · Post #4 (**permalink**) 09-30-2006, 06:57 AM

Well ... being the skeptic I am these days ... can't help thinking its like those "Opt Out" links in email Spam. All they do is confirm they have a good email address.

Can't help thinking its the same thing with the Forum Spam ... the link just lets them know their spam is getting through correctly to the forum.

I had my own forum (very small one) a few years back. And I started getting those Forum Spam things. In a classic case of overkill ... I traced the IP ... found out that all of the posts were coming from one block of IP's and banned the whole friggin' lot of them. Cured the spam problem. But I guess if there was someone legit using the same block of IP's ... then they couldn't access my site either. But I'd rather have that than the forum spam

But that was me

Peter

Artashes · Post #5 (**permalink**) 09-30-2006, 09:25 AM

Peter, forum spam is more complicated these days as spammers hide behind 1, sometimes 2 proxy servers - makes it difficult to track down.
In my books, they do not do it for traffic, rather for search engine rankings for certain keywords, in hopes not all forums will notice. With a recent boost in free board hosting services, there are hundreds of thousands of forums that are installed but not active.

ACENET-Jason · Post #6 (**permalink**) 11-11-2006, 03:40 AM

It definitely has become a big issue these days. We offer several forums scripts with our hosting and many clients install the forums then never actually use them.

Marks · Post #7 (**permalink**) 11-11-2006, 05:54 AM

Doesn't vBulletin.org have a Hack that prevents users signing up if there behind a proxy server. I'm sure there was. Or was that in my dreams?

Artashes · Post #8 (**permalink**) 11-11-2006, 12:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marks

Doesn't vBulletin.org have a Hack that prevents users signing up if there behind a proxy server. I'm sure there was. Or was that in my dreams?

If you find it, please let me know.
I closed down the registrations on four inactive forums because of spam.

inogenius · Post #9 (**permalink**) 11-11-2006, 05:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Artashes

Peter, forum spam is more complicated these days as spammers hide behind 1, sometimes 2 proxy servers - makes it difficult to track down.
In my books, they do not do it for traffic, rather for search engine rankings for certain keywords, in hopes not all forums will notice. With a recent boost in free board hosting services, there are hundreds of thousands of forums that are installed but not active.

I don't know of too many hacks that are that great at preventing forum spam, but I have found that some mod_security tricks work really well. I recommend checking out the rule sets at http://www.gotroot.com/. Their Bad UserAgents blocking, Comment spam blacklist, Compromised/Hacker boxes blacklist all have worked pretty well at blocking forum spammers for me, since most are simple bots scouring the internet.