Cheshire Cat Computing

Hi,

It seems to me that most people that are commenting about spam have only just joined this forum (me included ), I am trying to understand why and also what benefit spam farms from China could possibly get?

Any person with an understanding of the English language can tell a mile off whether or not the post has been written by a native English speaking person add that to the fact that most if not all are trying to sell some kind of enhancement type of medicine shouts spam to me, which I would not even give it a second glance

Is the reason that forums are getting so unhappy is because of the moderation that needs to be done to stop spam or the fact that it clogs up much needed space on the forums, I for one only read posts that I am interested in so if I came across rubbish I just skip over it... job done.

Mick

The forum spam is used by spam farms to increase google rankings.

They post rubbish spam filled with links to their website, and since this site has a goog Google rankning then it rolls down to give their site additional ranking points. The intention is not even to make you click on the links (though they want that too) the primary reason for their spamfarms attacking us is to get more google points.

You probably dont realise the trouble it causes as you're not a forum admin. Until I banned all hotmail and yahoo email addresses, I was having to delete twenty accounts EACH DAY along with several postings from each account. The spam to signal ratio was heavily on the spam side... about a dozen spam threads for every real thread, as this is a low-volume forum.

Its not so easy to spot the stuff you want to read, it makes things lok messy, and it takes a lot of my time to clear out (time that could be better used developing software)

If you went to the beach, and it was covered in litter you wouldn't say 'oh, I can just step over it, not a problem'....

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Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11

I have a suggestion. Why not post antispam questions that are really difficult to answer? or questions that have answers found in one of the forum threads?

The problem with difficult antispam questions (and difficult captchas) is that it puts off legitimate users. Spam farmers, on the other hand, are getting paid for this so they dont care and can still answer the questions. Make the question too difficult and noone bothers to register except spammers!
Questions that verify your English ability are also problematic as we have a number of non-native speakers in the community.

Maybe I should make a question "Is Tibet part of China" and give responses of "yes", "no", and "I dont really care, let me in already". Anyone who says "yes" is likely from China and therefore a spam farmer

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Steve Shipway
UNIX Systems, ITSS, University of Auckland, NZ
Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning... -- Isaiah 5:11

Spammers are targeting high page rank sites. I don't know the page rank of this site but because spammers are attracted to this site, it must be high. It must be really hard for webmasters to combat spammers.

Just registered here .Lol the captcha was even hard for me how the spam bot (right ?) can get in ?

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kit kat or cit cat ? Confused ? me too :D coode ? code ? or god ?[url=http://asospromocodes.net]Asos promo code[/url] :(

I might be unpopular stating this but if the spammers only objective is to place a link or a signature well why not simply disallow HTML, BB code etc. and remove the profile URL text box.

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Cheers, Nicholas