OK, what's with the idiot spammer(s)?

[Sieggy]

Like it says in the subject line . . . spam is one thing, but really stupid spam that no one with the sense god gave a caesar salad would be dense enough to click on is another. Is this Plotarmor throwing some kind of cyber snit over getting banned or what? The spammers name keeps changing, but the general tone of juvenality makes me think that it's one person with an axe to grind. Can someone block his IP, maybe? Or perhaps add a mod or two who can delete & ban this dolt as he makes he obnoxious appearance? I'll be more than happy to check in a few time a day and bounce his sorry ass . . .

[drachefly]

Spammers want most of all to contact people with less sense than caesar salad. Er, less sense than a caesar salad has, not that they have more caesar salad than sense.

Also, cue spammers replying to this thread in 3… 2… 1…

[WaterMonkey314]

Spammers want most of all to contact people with less sense than caesar salad. Er, less sense than a caesar salad has, not that they have more caesar salad than sense.

Also, cue spammers replying to this thread in 3… 2… 1…

Hi? I'm not a spammer.

But this is really getting a bit ridiculous. Could we implement Kitten-Auth for the forum like the wiki?

[cmptrwz]

The spammers are probably going for increases in search result hits by getting as many links from as many places to their sites for their keywords.

In other words, the people on this site aren't supposed to fall for them.

The search engines that crawl this site, however, are.

Making all posted links spawn a rel="nofollow" attribute would make the site a lot less potentially attractive for these kinds of spammers by telling the search engines "don't use these links for ranking". I don't know how many search engine companies other than google pay attention to that tag, though.

[Lamech]

I thought they were some flavor of spam-bot. Fire off a pre-canned message, maybe some sort of AI to make it appear semi-relevant. They are probably actually cleverly designed programs made to appear realish and defeat the anti-bot measures of signing up in some cases. Point is not plotarmour and probably not going to reply to this thread out of spite being not human and all.

[WaterMonkey314]

Is it just me, or is it getting worse? I can barely read anything without seeing swarms of "wow gold" links...

[Housellama]

Is it just me, or is it getting worse? I can barely read anything without seeing swarms of "wow gold" links...

Yes they suck. Ignore them. It's easy enough to scroll past them. They will get deleted. They suck, but they will be beaten. Let's just enjoy the forums and ignore them completely since we at this level can't do anything about it.

[Willowleafs]

The funniest thing? At the moment they are "answering" each other.

[Lamech]

The funniest thing? At the moment they are "answering" each other.

So when AI's emerge from the net instead of Skynet killing everyone it will try to sell us WoW gold?

[WaterMonkey314]

The funniest thing? At the moment they are "answering" each other.

So when AI's emerge from the net instead of Skynet killing everyone it will try to sell us WoW gold?

Aye, and Levitra and shoes to boot! (pun intended)

[Mal]

BUY GOLD NOW WOW GOLD CHEAP FREE ENLARGEMENTS GOLD VIAGRA CHEAP NOW BU-

Er, I mean to say.... Purged most of the spammers just now. They build up a lot in 4 days @_@

[Beeskee]

Best sig I ever saw about this (from the Dwarf Fortress forums)

Quote from: Generic Spam Bot #413612
There are several funding opportunities available for small businesses, ranging from a straight business loan secured against some form of collateral, to a business angel, or dragon if you like, willing to invest in your business in return for a share in it

--

Most of the 'spammers' are automated bots that throw together random words with links to whatever site they're promoting/pimping, which is likely to infect your machine with malware if you browse with IE. A relatively easy way to block most of them from signing up is including a question that automated bots can't answer easily. There are several examples on the phpbb discussion boards.

[drachefly]

On the Star Control Discussion Board, you need to sort a list into two columns, by whether a species appears in Star Control or Star Trek. You could do something like that here.

[BLANDCorporatio]

I love the dada prose that sometimes crops up in spam posts. If requested, I could paste here some particularly pretty examples I've saved.

Here's another I noticed, though it's not really dada (links and mentions to wow whatever scrubbed)

'You lie discolour, Elfride said Mrs. Swancourt the next period at breakfast. 'Isn't she relative Harry?' A vulnerable woman who is scarcely ill at all can hardly cater decorous so when regarded as much by all eyes motion upon now; the minute we acquire her at the plateau in obeisance to several truism. Everybody looked at Elfride. She certainly was discolor. 'Am I discolour?' she said with a weak grin. 'I did not nap such.

which appears to be a poorly translated to ??? then back again to English fragment of Thomas Hardy's "A pair of blue eyes" (though I cannot yet locate the exact original paragraph).

What, it's interesting.

EDIT:

Some more, from the same auteur (uvwx843):

Its theologist and mother one day bearing in the jungle, a few guys get them Zhuozou the nets. It followed the uncle and aunty reluctantly after a period of abstraction, and ulterior was fired because too untold substance intake, it self-reliance by herself.It is also a enough day; the day motion between the trees bananas, until the day it played a object to the alfresco worldso it finishes, another off a player and came to the provide of a camp community. It is dry, so fuddle plenteousness of element sitting in a little course, then added blighter paddled canoe finished.

The MO seems again to backtranslate an English text, but what it was is harder to tell (Elfride Swancourt? with google, too easy). Zhuozou seems to be a variant spelling of Zhuzhou, but that's all I have.

[mortissimus]

Poetry as the first genre to die the death of a million Turing tests?

[BLANDCorporatio]

Poetry (unless it is song lyrics) is mostly dead already. In English speaking parts of the world. An English speaking poet said.

He may have been full of BS, but sounded convincing at the time.

[Oberon]

I love the dada prose that sometimes crops up in spam posts. If requested, I could paste here some particularly pretty examples I've saved.

I've always assumed that this add-on text was intended to throw off filters which used a checksum or other methods of comparing one spam post to another. As in, add in a paragraph or two of egregious text and your post attempting to sell "C iA1 is" won't get bumped.

[BLANDCorporatio]

Plausible hypothesis. Because, pace xkcd, making a filter that rejects messages that make no sense is an ill-posed problem. So obviously, making sense is not a priority, but merely providing some text buffer to sneak links into.

Maybe the idea is that a few links spread somewhat thin in a paragraph looks less suspicious.

That said, some spambots here have posted merely links, and no fluff at all.

[WaterMonkey314]

The worst I've seen are the ones with spam links in the sig or profile, and NO links in the posts. In fact, the posts are sometimes very brief, generic things that make you wonder if they are a person or not. After all, you really don't want a false positive.

On a board I'm an admin on, sometimes I end up just PMing the person to ask if they're human.

[Sieggy]

Of course, I really have to wonder what sort of hydrocephalic chimp would actually be stupid enough to click on anything that goes 'wow gold' or whatever the come on link is. Seriously, how many million spams would you have to send out in order to get any responses whatsoever? I'm assuming it will immediately place some form of malware on your system as it directs you to their server out in lower east Slobbovia where 'Peggy' will try to sell you something, just give me your CC number . . . You'd have to have an IQ somewhere between a beet and a radish to click on something as transparently stupid as that.