Just talking about spam with a friend today and I mentioned I only get about 1 or 2 spam gmails a month, but get all kinds of spam texts and phone calls every day. So I was curious what spam was like on the Dope. I’ve only seen it a few times, all inserted in threads and all immediately identifiable as spam. All very early in the morning, east coast time.
I’m guessing there must be an automatic spam filter of some sort that catches the obvious spam. So what does the spam that makes it far enough to open an account and make a post look like?
Is it the type of gibberish with odd capital letters and stray exclamation points?
Do they start threads or post in existing threads?
Do the threads have real looking topics, like “Who played Joe in that movie?”
Or are they more like “Make money at home Fast!”?
If they are inserted in threads, do they ever make sense in the context of the thread?
In many cases the “spam filter” is people immediately reporting the spam. The board has active participants around the world in a variety of time zones, so spam popping up gets seen and flagged pretty quickly most of the time. The spam threads are easier to spot, but the posts inserted into threads don’t last long either.
As for the types of spam, well, we get all sorts, from incoherent lists of links to bespoke ones; a few do at least make an attempt to “make sense in the context of the thread” but it’s still pretty obvious spam.
IANA mod but I believe the ones that linger the longest are the “links in profile” ones, but that’s because few people see and report the links there so as spam goes it’s pretty ineffective and pointless.
ETA: It’s also worth noting that this board probably has a demographic less likely to fall for and click on spam than most corners of the internet.
Our spam mostly comes from places in the world where it’s daylight and prime working hours at that time (India, Pakistan, Vietnam, China, the Ukraine, etc).
Not usually.
Both.
For threads that the spammers start, it’s usually an obvious spam, like “Best whatchamacallit in Dubai” with a paragraph of pure ad-speak.
Sometimes.
Spammers will occasionally look for keywords or maybe they’ll google the thread title or something. For example if there was a thread about potato guns, a spammer might post something like " The potato is a starchy tuber of the plant Solanum tuberosum and is a root vegetable native to the Americas" indicating that they just googled one of the words. The word “potato” in their post might contain a link. Sometimes they will get sneaky and hide the link in punctuation (presumably so that google will index their link, since none of our users would likely notice the link or click on it).
It is very common for spammers to respond to several threads with very short and quick replies, obviously not putting much thought into them. They do this to get a history on the board to avoid spam filters. For example, if there is a big debate about the shooting of JFK, they might post something like “I think this is a big issue”. Sometimes it looks like they at least read the topic, but sometimes they’ll post something like “I think this was a good post” which is so generic that they probably didn’t bother to read anything, or it was posted by a script of some sort.
A couple of us go through all the new users when we have time and look for profile spammers. I don’t think they care so much if our users click on the links, they are just trying to get google and other search engines to rate their links higher.
Yeah, I know we have a couple of Dopers that report a lot of spam. @running_coach is mentioned a lot and I believe he’s in the US, I assume in a different time zone than me. I imagine most of the non-US/Canada dopers see a lot more spam than I do. You’re in the UK, no? Do you see spam a lot in the mornings?
I didn’t even know this was a thing. The links I see in legit profiles are usually non functioning links to things like GeoCities or MySpace. Update those links, Dopers!
I figured that was why. You guys are pretty quick on the spammers, I see very few.
This part I don’t quite understand. How does Google rate their links higher if nobody clicks on them or even knows they are there? Is it just a numbers game, the more they put out, the higher the Google rank, the more legitimate they seem?
I guess I’m really out of touch on this. I thought spam wanted you to click on links to screw you over with some kind of scam for money or personal info.
Google knows they are there. About a third of our traffic here comes from “spiders”, which are bots by Google and other search engines that go through our web pages and index everything.
I don’t know how Google does its infamous algorithm. No one but Google does. But to use an oversimplified example, let’s say you are a spammer. You go on web page X and link to your spam. Then you go to web page Y and link to your spam. Then you go to web page Z and link to your spam. Google sees the three different links and thinks “gee, that must be a popular web site, we’ll rank it higher in the search results”. This is way oversimplified and Google can’t be fooled that easily, but that’s the basic principle at work.
There are companies that do “search engine optimization” or SEO for you, for a fee. One of the running jokes is that SEO stands for Spam Everyone Often. You give them money, they promise you better rankings and more clicks on your web site. Often it’s not obvious to the customer that they are basically hiring a spammer. They think that they are paying for advertising services or some such.
Does it actually work? Do SEO spammers actually increase your clicks? I have no idea. All I know is that all of the SEO spams we get here get deleted and reported to the spam filter folks. It very well could be that all SEO companies do is take your money and get you blacklisted as a spammer. I suspect that a lot of their customers don’t even realize that the SEO company is in someplace like India or Pakistan.
Actually I’ve seen a lot less since the move to Discourse. ECG may be able to explain whether that’s because the spam filter is better, or whether I’m just not noticing it. But I’d often see them either early in the morning or very late in the evening, consistent with East Asian business hours.
From what I can tell, the automatic spam filter here is in fact better than it was on vBulletin. There are presumably a lot of things that it just doesn’t let through at all, and there are also a fair number that the system flags and says “This first post by this new poster looks fishy”, and waits for one of us meatbags to come along and confirm it. Those posts that it thinks looks fishy almost always are actually spam, and unless one of us approves it, nobody but the mods ever gets to see it at all.
I knew about spiders, I didn’t realize they were looking for info like that. Not really surprised, tho. Since you refer to them as traffic, do spiders count towards views for the board?
Ok, I get that part, thanks.
That would be quite the racket in itself. It would be funny if they didn’t catch up people that were looking for legit help.
I would think Discourse had to have some effect. The vBulletin version we had was so old I’m not sure we even had support anymore. Thanks for the reply.
Any rough guess to how big of a percentage of spam makes it to an actual mod? On an average day how many require mod attention? Are you notified by forum or do all mods get the spam notices across the board?