I just received “instant notification” of an addition to a thread I started July 8 of last year. When I copy and paste and go to that thread, this guy’s addition is not present. Even when I reload the page. And when I searched for all of his posts in the last two days, it doesn’t list any. How did I get a message that something posted, but the board doesn’t have any record of it, and there’s no new post, for that matter?
Was it this thread? If so, the post was spam, and I removed it. So you got a notification because someone else had posted to the thread, but the post itself is gone.
Yep - that was the thread. The post was spam? What does that mean?
Oh, that thread - I read the post. It was some dude who was probably google-searching for stuff. He bumped the thread with a post that pretty much said “find a solution here” linked to a website he was promoting.
Some spammers go from message board to message board posting stuff about “Go to this site to find this marvelous product that has nothing to do with the thread I’m posting in.” Presumably they make some money, e.g., if they are being paid by the click, but they are tiresome. Thank you, Marley23, and the other mods, for getting rid of stuff like that.
It’s pretty much what Ferret Herder and Giles said. I didn’t read the post that thoroughly and the guy’s English was not great, but essentially he bumped your thread to post about a product that deals with the problem you were having. I saw he’d made the same post to other sites, so I removed the post and banned him.
I am all against spam. But. If the product the guy was hawking did solve the OP’s problem (as opposed to just being a link to some random product), wouldn’t it be of interest and worth keeping?
IF it’s a legitimate product and IF it is not a redirect to some malware laden info stealer and IF it is not itself a Trojan. Lottsa IFs.
Tue on all accounts. Maybe just PM the link to the OP.
Actually, in this type of spam they really don’t care if you click on their link. What they want to do is piggyback on the Dope’s high Google rank, which, when they’re linked from our boards, elevates their own Google rank (by link association). This is also why we find 0 post spammers who just add a link to their sig and/or homepage in their profile.
Marley23 does a phenomenal job of keeping our boards spam free, to a point where most of our users rarely ever see any spam. In a world where most comments are spam (see YouTube and other news sites for examples) that’s quite a feat. Other mods help too, but it’s mostly Marley23 and spamclem.