Thanks Ginger!

[Gale in KY]

Our front page is Spam free once again! Like Lee said, be sure to report these posts so Ginger can remove them. Question? Do you have the ability to ban those who are posting this crap? I see another one coming shortly, just by looking at who's logged on right now.

[austxdan]

I'll also say a big "Thanks Ginger" for getting things all cleaned up. :)

But I do also have questions about the frequency of these posts. :mad:

Yes, I belong to a variety of 'Roo flavored boards, and by far this forum gathers more of these types of posts than any of the others. Is there something different that could be done to protect this board from the SPAMbots, illegal pharmacies, and Russian brides-to-be?

I'm sure there are plenty of folks who would help out if needed, otherwise I find myself tending to open the "General Forum", take a look at the garbage, and move on. There's got to be a better way, no?


Dan

[Gale in KY]

These posts are explained by a spammer on a blog I recently read. His well paying job is to post as many of these posts as he can to raise the individual website's que on search providers such as Google, Yahoo..Everytime somebody clicks on one of these posts, it raises their spot in line..for instance, if you enter Jobs in Googles search engine..the spammer's job is to get the sites he spams to come up as high on the list as possible.

There is a hidden cue in these..you don't even have to click on the actual website they are promoting..all you have to do is click on the post they make in the forum, blog, or website. Sounds like everytime we click to report to Ginger, we are actually increasing the flow of spam to our website and also helping these people to promote their useless websites. The more clicks that show up from our forum, the more of these posts we will see...because out there somewhere is a list of the forums, blogs, etc. that activity to these posts is registered and rated..and the spammers know where these lists are and use them to decide where to post their crap, obviously posting to the webpages, forums that they see alot of activity to spam posts on. They get paid by that activity..this guy has made enough $$$ doing this crap to buy a place on the beach in Tulum..:rolleyes: good thing he hasn't actually read our forum, or he would probably be doing this from our little paradise in Mexico instead of his home in London.

From what I read at his website, everytime we report a spam post to Ginger, we are ridding our forum of that post, but encouraging more to appear. Eventually, based on activity...a webpage, forum or blog can be taken over by these spam posts..although he says "It isn't personal, it's business, sorry for the disturbance." Geez...

[austxdan]

Gale,

Thanks - and an interesting concept. I was under the impression that reporting the post didn't actually have anything to do with the actual spammer post, but apparently (per your description) that is no longer the case.

So plan "B" would be to just IM Ginger without actually opening the post. How do you like that one "G"? :cool:


Dan

[AdGuy]

They get paid by that activity..this guy has made enough $$$ doing this crap to buy a place on the beach in Tulum.

For the past 21 years, I've been on the 'legitimate' side of advertising and still don't have a Tulum beach house...seems I'll have to venture to the dark side! :D

[Ginger]

I'm okay with the PM's instead of using the alert button.

There are ways to stop the spam on the site, and there are ways to ban users by IP address, etc. however often these people change IP's so that isn't always fruitful.

Also unfortunately, I don't have enough access privileges to ban people. And James has mentioned a few times that this board will be eventually amalgamated into the Playa.info board, so I guess that means he doesn't warrant that this one needs the attention right now of finding ways to stop the spam. James is also busy with a new baby, btw.

I will send James a message and see what more can be done. Thanks for your patience guys, and for hanging in there!

[austxdan]

For the past 21 years, I've been on the 'legitimate' side of advertising and still don't have a Tulum beach house...seems I'll have to venture to the dark side! :D

. . . Just be sure you pick a different forum for your "illegitimate" ads :p .


Dan

[james]

...
There is a hidden cue in these..you don't even have to click on the actual website they are promoting..all you have to do is click on the post they make in the forum, blog, or website. Sounds like everytime we click to report to Ginger, we are actually increasing the flow of spam to our website and also helping these people to promote their useless websites. The more clicks that show up from our forum, the more of these posts we will see...because out there somewhere is a list of the forums, blogs, etc. that activity to these posts is registered and rated..and the spammers know where these lists are and use them to decide where to post their crap, obviously posting to the webpages, forums that they see alot of activity to spam posts on. They get paid by that activity..this guy has made enough $$$ doing this crap to buy a place on the beach in Tulum..:rolleyes: good thing he hasn't actually read our forum, or he would probably be doing this from our little paradise in Mexico instead of his home in London.

From what I read at his website, everytime we report a spam post to Ginger, we are ridding our forum of that post, but encouraging more to appear. Eventually, based on activity...a webpage, forum or blog can be taken over by these spam posts..although he says "It isn't personal, it's business, sorry for the disturbance." Geez...it doesn't really work like that. a link that isn't clicked doesn't generate any revenue by it's existence. it creates Google relevence as outbound links from this site. Also some people will click, and in the game of spam, it's a super small percentage of a very huge number of views.

Most of these posts are not made by humans but by programs (bots) that have learned to defeat the default image authentication system of this forum software. they crawl the web and once a weakness is discovered the bots will keep coming back.

I'll wager the mod I just installed will slow this down quite a bit. (edit: half an hour after doing this, I just found a new one. damn. maybe we have bots and humans hitting us.)

I'll try to check back in more often, too, as we wind down this site and push the content into Playa.Info (a tulum forum there).