At the risk of besmirching the good name of the spammers, I think it is highly unlikely that they have acquired the legal right to stream live sports. So they likely do not want the paper trail that setting up legitimate advertising would require.
Alternatively, maybe there is no live streaming at all and the spammers are just leading you to pages full of ads/scam websites/&c.
It feels like a surge over the last couple of days and I also assumed it was coinciding with the beginning of football. I hope that means it will slow down.
I am no expert on this but there are various techniques used to combat it. We will not discuss those methods in the open. Spammers are also always looking for ways to infiltrate and they develop countermeasures.
Would it be more work or less work in the long run for the mods if the registration process had to be manually approved? Something like “please tell us why you’d like to join SDMB in words that are at least semi-intelligent and don’t obviously come from either a bot or a dumbass”. (You might want to phrase it differently ;)). Might improve the quality of the new-joins, too.
“Don’t obviously come from either a bot or a dumbass?” Are you intending to stop ALL new posters? A regular injection of Misters or Misses Dumas are the lifeblood of some fora.
It usually at least filters out bots when you make people who register answer a dumb question like “what is the sum of 2 and 3?” or “what color was Washington’s white horse?” It won’t stop the manual spammers, though.
Questions like that don’t work too well-- If you have a small number of them, then a human can just go through and answer all of them for the bot, paving the way for an arbitrarily-large number of bots to get through. And if you have enough question-answer pairs to thwart that, then you end up doing more work than the spammers.
Reddit is set up with very little overarching authority. Pretty much anyone can create their own sub-reddit, and then that sub-redditor is responsible for maintaining whatever standards they choose to maintain. The sub-reddits in question here are probably owned by the spammers themselves, who thus have no problem allowing the spam (and in fact, probably don’t allow anything else).
Ok. Makes sense. But are they going to make any money with misleading thread titles on the SDMB? If I wanted live streaming, that’s now how I’d get to their site.
The whole point is to blend in. Make it look like a legitimate thread.
Of course, misspelling and awkward English defeats the purpose.
:ETA: Also intending to beat spam filters.
Hence the copy/paste of previous thread titles.
Most of these spammers are people in Bangladesh, India, Russian Federation, Philippines who possibly get paid $1-$5/day to do this. Very cost effective for the website owners trying to drive traffic to their sites.
I followed one link before it got nuked–the spammer thread was part of a legitimate subreddit. The user had already been banned, and if you went to the subreddit itself you could no longer find the thread.
So it looks like when Reddit mods nuke a user/thread, it may vanish from the subreddit, but it is still reachable via direct link.
It’s almost always the text that will be used for the link.
You have to catch it in the first minute or so, they post then immediately edit.
Wild guess is that sites that don’t allow links for the first few posts will allow a link to be edited in.
