As we have said before, we don’t want to discourage new members. Annoying as it is, spam hasn’t reached the levels that might force us to do this.
Besides this, it would make additional work for us. We would still have to review all the spam posts, as well as the legitimate new users.
And, as persistent as these pests seem to be, they would make a seemingly legitimate post like “The Browns are the most underrated team in the NFL,” just to get approved, and then start posting their spam.
The many layers of links to links to links makes me suspect that the eyes they want seeing their spam are Google’s, not ours. Google’s original algorithm was based on web pages that got more links to them getting more hits. Of course, that’s fairly easy to game, so they started weighting it, so that links from higher-ranked pages are given more weight than links from lower-ranked pages. So it might be that they’re trying to use message boards like ours, to increase the weight of the sites that they’re linking to here, so those can in turn increase the weight of yet other sites, and so on, until (they hope) the page that asks for the credit card gets a high enough ranking to actually come up as a search result. This would also explain why they often have a dozen different links to the same game, with slightly different phrasing on the description: If you don’t do that, it would take an exorbitant number of earlier links to build up a single final link.
Yeah, that’s what happens on other message boards that have some sort of limitations what new posters can do based on their posts - a bunch of seemingly normal posts very light on content, then spam. Not sure if it would be a huge improvement.
Some of them do that anyway now, presumably based on what other boards do.
I’m an AVG subscriber… And…thank’ee for looking one level deeper into the quagmire and/or cesspool. (And shame on them for such an odious lie!)
Not that it is appropriate for casual testing, but I am slightly curious as to exactly what malware they are pushing. Of course the answer could be none at all, so that the site does not get automatically blacklisted, and maybe they rely purely on credit-card fraud (which could still get them blacklisted, but much more slowly since the marks would need to manually report it).
Seems pretty convoluted for spammers as stupid as these seem to be. And how much monetary return would that represent compared to the effort they are putting in?
Also, would that work if the posts are deleted almost immediately? My understanding is that Google spiders can’t access pages that require a login to view. Since deleted spam is only visible to logged-in mods, presumably it won’t be accessible to search or indexing. Unless a spider happens to hit a page in the few minutes a spam message is up before being deleted, it should have no effect.
Google is known to scan SDMB very frequently, it seems. New posts often show up in Google searches within minutes.
I second this motion, and further, I think that ANY member here (and maybe even Guests here) should have this power. The banned OP’s could be simply be temporarily suspended and their posts hidden, and referred to a moderator for review. The moderator could re-instate them if it’s actually legit, or ban them.
I think we can fairly well trust users to NOT abuse this privilege, and it could be a warnable offense if anyone does.
I mean, that’s a pretty good way to hush someone in a debate. Temp ban da fool!
Well, regardless of their motivations, we know for a fact that their setup is pretty convoluted, as evidenced by the results of running coach and Harrington’s investigations. Whatever their motive is, it’s something that calls for convolution.
I’m guessing that the link-farms deeper down the rabbit hole are forums where they’ve found that spam is not cleaned up quickly, so they don’t need to keep updating the links to those pages. In other words, they have actually noticed that we clean up quickly, and have cut back on us as a result, and what we’re seeing is actually the cut-back version.
They are certain capable of posting much more than they do. On September 12, 2015 (a day that will live in infamy) we were subjected to Spampocalypse, a spam attack of unprecedented proportions. We fought them in GQ, we fought them in GD, we fought them in IMHO and MPSIMS, we fought them in the Pit. We never surrendered. Lo, when the smoke had cleared, more than 100 spammers had been sent to the Great Cornfield. (Well, 100 spammer names, but you know what I mean.)
They wax and wane a bit, but they’ve never approached than number again. So they evidently do respond to some extent to what they do.
The gratitude of every poster on our message board goes out to the SDMB mod, who, undaunted by spam, are turning the tide of the Spam War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of message board posting was so much owed by so many to so few.
Not even close, it’s Running Coach. With laser like precision, he focuses his advanced spamdar on those who dare come here with such evil motives. Thereafter, he rings the bell in the mod lounge like a trusted fire alarm, warning of a fire on aisle 2. He does everything but actually ban them. And that’s a shame. It’s like a loyal police dog that never is allowed to bite a thieving crook’s ass after cornering him. Not fair to the dog at all.
Actually, the mods get something like 90% of the spammers before they post.
Or so they claim. 
We get the ones that get through.
The only reason I get so many is because I spend so much time at the computer. Everyone here pulls their weight on this.
I wasn’t really trying to assign spam-busting credit. I was just having a little fun with Colibri’s allusion to a Winston Churchill WWII speech.
Glad you got the reference. There’s a bit of FDR’s Pearl Harbor speech in there too. 
This article from BuzzFeed may explain a lot. Streaming sites may be designed to load popunders which generate fake traffic, gathering click revenue. It is intended to defeat the bot-detectors, as this scheme isn’t really a conventional bot.