Talk:Forum spam/Archives/2013

Spam without links

Does anyone know why the spammers are posting these type of posts to different forums. Here's an example: http://www.forumgarden.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24905 . You can get over 12k hits from google with that username. His profile doesn't have any info/links either. 84.251.212.157 18:18, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps so people will respond with links or email addresses, and they can spam THOSE ? Sounds too complicated for a spammer though. Here's an oddity I've seen for 10 years now and always been confused by: When searching for some things, I'd sometimes find a link to one of those old-style forums (not sure of the name, but it was available in the 90s, text based, and you didn't have to register or click a separate link to write a response - just fill the box at the bottom), and every message would invariably have a dozen blank responses. It's not that they weren't saved correctly, because I've seen those when they're new too. And since the usernames were filled in (Not with spammer-type names either!), it couldn't have been a complete accident for that many people. 76.204.78.109 01:51, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

I concur! Mindman1 00:50, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Flawed?

Under the first paragraph of this article, it seems as if Spam cannot be prevented without the use of ban buttons. How is this true? In some cases, Spam zones are very useful, and actually cut down major Spam by a lot, though it doesn't help with going Off-topic. A very good example would be the forum in which I go, http://www.c404.net/forum. Very clean and tidy. GamePlayer623 16:54, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

Freebase Email?

No reference to what this term means in the article or linked to a post in the Wiki. google turns up little. 192.147.57.6 19:29, 12 December 2006 (UTC)andi

Customization

The forum spammers rely on the fact that the field names of the forms for registration are always the same (for each forum software). The problem is to find out which name field belongs to which field. But if you slightly change the name statically they are defeated (if it's not human cheap labor). Things get even more tricky if you combine the information about the client with a (secret) pass-phrase and take the MD5 (or another hash) of it. I personally include different informations about the server, a different pass-phrase for every form field and and the client information to get a fairly unique and non-predictable name. Now shuffling the fields around will make it near-impossible for non-humans to solve this at the moment. Scanning the text to find the correct field name does not really help as it would cause problems for the spammers in different languages.

This really helps from my experience and the experience of others. You don't even need CAPTCHAs anymore which anyway annoy blind or visually impaired people more than common bots. Oh and of course you should never show user profiles without posts or just don't show website links for these users. A reasonable minimum number of posts ensures that spammers have no chance if the forum is well-moderated.

Wanna see how easily they defeat CAPTCHAs and issue tons of registrations in a few minutes? Go to -> "www" dot "botmaster" dot "net" slash "movies" slash "XFull.htm" :-\ ... I don't want to advertise for these <your favorite swear-word here>, so I did not put it as a normal hyperlink. --85.220.99.161 01:49, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Merging Newsgroup spam, Forum spam and Spam in blogs

I suggest merging these three articles, as they have a common history, newsgroup spam evolved into forum/comment/blog spam, and I think that one article dealing with history, countermeasures etc would be better than three articles containing much of the same. Bjelleklang - talk Bug Me 13:29, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Forum and blog spam seem similar enough to merge, especially since the spammer and counter-measure technology are pretty much the same. I would think newsgroup spam was distinct from a technical standpoint, even though the intent is the same. Metlslime 22:56, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Metlslime about Newsgroup spam being too different. Also, as a merge target, "Internet spam" is too broad since that would also include email. I guess a possible name for the merged article would be "webpage spam" or "webpage comment abuse"? --Gronky (talk) 09:25, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

"Webpage spam" is not relevent to this type of Spam. Proper name would be "weblog Spam" but I think very few Internet users are familiar with this terminology. You also have to think of how users will find this article. They will probably get to it via a search engine query. So unless you have the keywords in the page title and url, the results will not produce this article. How about, "Blogs, forums, and newsgroup Spam". Now I know it looks a bit Spammy, but that is SEO. Can you think of a better name, that will help the intended readers find the article? Igor Berger (talk) 10:21, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

I disagree with merging, since these three articles are on entirely different types of spam. Tohd8BohaithuGh1 (talk) 10:50, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Page protected: edit request

Why is this page protected? Spam I'd guess. Anyway, please edit "A troll by the name of Klerck allegedly used this little trick to make trolls such as..." to remove the name of the troll, which is stupid and pointless to include. Also change "A troll " to avoid redundancy, and "allegedly" since it's a weasel word. If this isn't verified then delete the entire paragraph. --64.149.36.43 (talk) 17:13, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Forum spam not from spam bots

There should be a part that there is info about spam from humans,not bots. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.250.198.100 (talk) 19:12, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Please add a link at article bottom

{{editsemiprotected}}

• Ultimate Spambot Killer Deny world-wide known Spambots to register to your forums.

Thanks,

Y2ksw (talk) 14:40, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but all that seems like it is is advertising. Can you please be more specific as to why we should include it? - NuclearWarfare ^{contact me}_{My work} 22:35, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

---

Reply:

It is a 100% free service with as little as possible advertising (besides being a subdomain and a small formal copyright line on each page, there is no advertising at all).

It significantly helps to reduce the constantly growing spam attacks to forums, using similar algorithms as already employed in email spam filters (e.g. Spamhaus). Its main features are to block known spammers before they can actually register, and verify the specified email address is up and working.

Please let me know what to do if it still appears to be advertising.

Thanks,

--Y2ksw (talk) 01:22, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

---

It appears I now can edit the section ... but still I'd like to know if it is now ok to insert the link. --Y2ksw (talk) 18:26, 19 November 2008 (UTC) http://www.spam.org is a link. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.68.250.135 (talk) 03:47, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Allowed forum spam

A discussion on an internet forum led to me adding this. Is spam still spam when spam is allowed by the owners of a forum?

Does an eyeball-soup become a minestrone when you happen to like eyeball-soup? Are retarded questions becoming intelligent ones because you know the answer?213.39.222.111 (talk) 09:00, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Spam Prevention

Should info and links be added some of the free/commercial plugins/mods/add-ons that can be used to prevent this sort of spam? As per Y2ksw comments above. Mtcooper (talk) 13:16, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

A couple of offsite resource links to consider.

Since I am involved in both of these sites, I think it proper for a 3rd party to review both, before adding links to the article. I feel that http://www.stopforumspam.com (which I moderate the forum of) is an invaluable resource to securing forums, as it has a "live" blacklist database of previous forum spamming attempts, containing e-mail address, IP address, and chosen username of the spammers found by moderators/admins on 100s of forums.

The other is my site, http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php . I have written and published a GNU/GPL V.2 php script that evaluates connections, and on attempts to register, confirm, or log into several compatible forum scripts, checks stopforumspam.com to see if the IP is a known spammer before letting them proceed. It can also check the list of known TOR nodes and stop that too. It has other functions, regarding hackbot neutralization that I won't go into here.

So, if you feel these are suitable for offsite links, I would appreciate a 3rd party adding them to the article. (This request will also be posted on page "Spambot").

66.119.62.235 (talk) 16:40, 11 May 2010 (UTC) Zaphod

There aren't enough references

I just looked at the references at the bottom, and there were two. One of them I had to remove because the link was dead. Meaning there is only one reference left, and that is from a bot F&Q site.

If anybody could find more references then please suggest them! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jonxy (talk • contribs) 12:19, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

Why section on Page widening?

Great info on Page widening, but how does that relate to spam? I do not see the connection clearly.

Shouldn't Page widening be on a page of its own or something? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.140.193.14 (talk) 18:08, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree with you, and I have removed this section of the article as it seemed offtopic, filled with WP:NOR and lacked sources. If someone thinks that this is related to the page, please feel free to undo the edit. Feinoha ^{Talk, My master} 19:48, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Someone seems to have reverted the page widening bit. I really don't see how it relates to the main article. Either this should be explained or page widening should be made into its own article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.193.253.59 (talk) 12:48, 16 August 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, this seems trivially unrelated to the issue of forum spamming; I've removed it again. --McGeddon (talk) 10:01, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

I've restored it. There's some history to this: see this redirect and the AfD that led here:

• Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Page widening

There are a fair number of links arriving via the redirect. It was initially redirected to word wrap but later shifted to here. If folks intent on this article feel it's inappropriate here, mebbe a WP:DRV or simply a resurrection of the original (w/some sources) would be the best move. There are two aspect to this; fucking with forums of various sorts, and inadvertent widening via <pre>, and such — and there are are differences in effects per your user agent. Cheers, Jack Merridew 10:33, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

It's still unsourced two years later. Given that the rest of the article is about actual spam, it seems off-topic to give a single arbitrary example of how you can mess up the formatting of a forum thread. I don't think it merits resurrection as a full article, so I've just cut it. --McGeddon (talk) 09:04, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

wrong language link, not possible to remove it

The lint to the "german article" is wrong, because it leads to de:Suchmaschinen-Spamming. But the english version of "Suchmaschinen-Spamming" is [[[spamdexing]]. And spamdexing is not the same as forum spam. I tried to remove the wrong language link, but this is not possible, because it is not displayed in the link list on wikidata. Can anyone remove this link? Mariofan13 (talk)

The problem is there, not here. One should not change anything in English Wikipedia, because we have a link to de:Forenspam which was (incompetently?) redirected by a de.wikipedia user. Go to de:talk:Suchmaschinen-Spamming and explain them their mistake. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 08:49, 23 May 2013 (UTC)