The abject BRAINLESSNESS of spammers

[valdore]

I'm one of two forum administrators on another message board completely unrelated to macs or technology. It's my job to delete all the spam accounts that are set up. We get everything from porn to mortgage refinancing to drugs. I also notice that almost all of the spam accounts come from .info domains or email addresses, which leads me to believe that the .info is completely abused and ruined by these skeezy sleazy scumbag piles of excrement.

Somehow that forum seems bookmarked by some big spammer database, so we get plenty of moronic new registrants who put stupid things in their user profiles that automatically give them away as being spammers.

Am I battling automated spambots? Or am I battling real people (who deserve to be shot)? Just who are these freaks who set up blogs about discount medications and then sign up to every message board they can find with a link to their stupid advert-blog in their profile?

 

[Blue Velvet]

Just who are these freaks who set up blogs about discount medications and then sign up to every message board they can find with a link to their stupid advert-blog in their profile?

They're the ones that have been summarily ejected from here.

 

[spork183]

They're the ones that have been summarily ejected from here.

We ejected them? Before the free viagra samples? Seems rather er, short sighted of us.

 

[miniConvert]

It seems crazy that all these 'SPAM' accounts get set up regardless of the image code and email address verification. Surely they must be being made manually and then entered into some sort of robot for the spamming to take place - it can sometimes happen quite a while after the account was made.

Despite hating it, I've had to enable moderation on new signups to both the forums I operate Making people wait to be able to post is crazy, but the volume of SPAM was overwhelming and totally unfair on current users. Now everything is SPAM free and, fortunately, no genuine signups seem to be deterred by the short delay.

vBulletin seriously need to figure something out to stop this.

 

[valdore]

I've had to enable administrator approval on new members as well...prevents spam from actually getting posted to the board. It's a small price to pay to prevent pervert porn from being posted.

 

[0098386]

yea they're mostly bots. On the other few forums I'm on, as soon as image verification was installed the spamming stopped instantly. Not to say you don't get some people doing it, but from my own experience they're just bots.

 

[yg17]

I've found that all the spambots create new threads, never reply...so, if you setup your forum so you have to have X posts to create a new thread, you'll stop the spambots dead in their tracks. We setup our forum like that months ago and haven't had a single spam post

 

[mkrishnan]

It also always intrigues me how there are those spam e-mails and web posts that don't actually really sell anything? Like they're all garbled up and sort of babbling about Cialis or **** buddies, but there's no web address or telephone number for you to contact them?

Where do they come from? Pirates? Script Kiddies? That's always bugged me. They're like some kind of weird post-modern static.

 

[thedude110]

They're like some kind of weird post-modern static.

Not just static, but a simulation of static.

I wish post-capitalism would get here already so we could just bury modernism and the nouns it rode in on (Read: Las Vegas).

 

[Doctor Q]

There are indeed forum-signup spambots, but human spammers will still sign up even if anti-spambot measures are applied. I'm just guessing, but I think spammer businesses pay for very cheap labor to do these manual signups.

Even if spammer accounts aren't used to post, they may be used to send Private Message spam, so it's worth watching for and removing them.

 

[sushi]

It also always intrigues me how there are those spam e-mails and web posts that don't actually really sell anything? Like they're all garbled up and sort of babbling about Cialis or **** buddies, but there's no web address or telephone number for you to contact them?

I've been curious about those types of SPAM as well.

Never figured out the purpose.

 

[dpaanlka]

I used to have a lot of spam forum bots, until I devised a clever scheme to prevent them. Sometimes, though, I still get what I believe is human forum spammers. I just delete them right away.