grumps - 13 April 2009 12:48 PM

The question is, ‘Does Google find those spam links in comments and treat them the same ways as if they were legitimate out links?’

Probably.  How would Google know it’s spam?

Arun S. - 13 April 2009 01:38 PM

Probably.  How would Google know it’s spam?

I suspect that the only way would be to follow the content trail; matching spam content with link with site. Seems like a lot of effort, though.

This is exactly the reason why I just hooked the forum up to entries on my site. I get absolutely zero spam. So far I haven’t had any forum spam (relatively low traffic - 2000 hits or so a week) but I won’t hold my breath. It’s probably only a matter of time. I’ve been seeing bestcigshop and crap like that in my referrals landing squarely on the register page.

Just come across a depressing blog post:
ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/
(removed the htttp:// because I didn’t want to link to it - you will have to copy and paste - its safe BTW!)

Look down at the comments and you can see rafts of people willing to bust Captchas for peanuts. 

So we add Captcha, might as well do it as it is a hurdle, but then what? I have downloaded Lows NoSpam module/extension but not tried it yet. The only EE installation I have a forum on is only reachable by logged in members and that’s a fairly closed off-line based society so that’s not a problem but contact forms are. I am seeing increasing amounts of spam coming through contact forms now and that’s just annoying - for me and my clients.

James Springer - 14 April 2009 02:33 AM

This is exactly the reason why I just hooked the forum up to entries on my site. I get absolutely zero spam.

I have one EE forum which gets very little spam, usually in streaks—three in one week, nothing for months. It’s a blight. Moderation works.

Just a quick follow up here.

I’ve been watching a forum, and yes, there are new bots hitting that can stay on topic, and appear to disucss the current topic.

This bot responded to the topic, including relating it to another issue, and maintained what looked like a conversation. there were a couple tiny things that made me realize it was a bot, but it was, and had I not been really watching I’d have not noticed.

JT Thompson - 14 April 2009 11:01 AM

I’ve been watching a forum, and yes, there are new bots hitting that can stay on topic, and appear to disucss the current topic

Link! Link! My kingdom for a link!!

The post and user might get deleted so check now
http://forums.mmanews.com/general-mma-forum/35181-where-you-watching-shamrock-vs-diaz.html

now, look at the post. last in the thread by ‘mma fighter’

Now look at the list of his posts. They look real, but they aren’t. and they are on topic, and appear to be having a real discussion.
http://forums.mmanews.com/search.php?searchid=117120

The most obvious problem? he’s watching the ppv in his home theater. Today. The fight was 4 days ago

UGH and you better hurry. they’re deleting his posts as we speak. there were over 30 a minute ago, now there are 5

JT Thompson - 14 April 2009 11:23 AM

UGH and you better hurry. they’re deleting his posts as we speak. there were over 30 a minute ago, now there are 5

Ugh. Had to register. Found two posts but they’re similar to what I’ve seen on a couple of sites I manage. The content appears to be ‘topical’ but without specifics. There’s always a link to some inappropriate site.

Nicely done.

late comment on this post but I’ve been getting about 6-10 of these spams a day. and they come from users who had to register!
deleting those members didn’t help because they seem to have the time to re-register every time, even with different IP addresses.

because valid forum members subscribe to posts, they do get emails every time the spammers post. so I ended up closing the forum!

what other solution is there? captcha won’t help.

pirco - 06 May 2009 12:44 PM

late comment on this post but I’ve been getting about 6-10 of these spams a day. and they come from users who had to register!
deleting those members didn’t help because they seem to have the time to re-register every time, even with different IP addresses.

because valid forum members subscribe to posts, they do get emails every time the spammers post. so I ended up closing the forum!

what other solution is there? captcha won’t help.

look in direction of proxy checking not sure how to implement it in EE but it may be worth looking into…

that would probably catch http://www.opendns.com/ clients as well, though (who are “legitimately” using proxy servers)?

It should not (I don’t know about this script itself) openDNS only improves name resolution it does not mask the IP….at least last time I looked at it.
Even bigger problem is people using legit apps to do so.
Depends on your level but there is no anonymous surfing and they can pull the logs if it becomes a huge dispute.
At the end of the day…if you are a ‘target’ then it is tiring process to keep blocking IPs.
But it is in your favor, it is a lot easier to ban than to register/post…it just sucks to deal with it.

There are rel-follow search engines out there that target sites which do not put rel=“no-follow” attributes to links in comments. They are used to find keyword relevant entries to drop off some links by spammers. I have a page that ranks very high in some of them for the killer-keyword “seo”.

In that entry I get lots of hand-crafted spam, mostly from agencies that sell so-called “seo services”. Only that they spam in that particular entry to build links for themselves while they sell the same service to other people for their keywords.

Lately I visited the site of one of those agencies and saw that they offer “quality link-building” by posting comments in keyword-relevant weblogs. “Hand crafted, on-topic and at least 10 words long”.
I was curious, so I contacted them and inquired their rate for deploying 50 comments. They offered me to do the job within 5 days for USD $100.
Based on that I asked for a commission of $1.75 for every comment they had left on my site. Sadly they did not answer…

You might also encounter google-search referrers with a keyword combination of

That are either bots or real people looking for comment-forms where they can leave spam related to “advertising” or whatever keyword the need.

Well, the spam has slowed down, but it seems as if people are being hired to leave spam!

I wrote an entry on linux, and got this gem in the comments:

Does this actually work? Oh well. Added to the blacklist.