Have you ever been confused by spammers?

Well, I've been keeping watch of all of my forums of spam and whatnot. Only a natural thing to do, right?

Well, a few days ago, this guy with this username: TwilamGallegos registered to one of my forums, I ignored him because his profile did not have any spammy links in his profile. Or any stupid spam crap.

I keep seeing it over and over again on 2 of my other sites. Until BAM. I was checking an IP address of another user, I click "other users." Guess what? I found TwilamGallegos' username attached to the list of IP's of the spammer! I was like "I know who you are now!" Think you can fool me!

Hah! Such power of xenForo!

 

I've noticed it myself, but I think it's a pretty common tactic employed by forum spammers. Instead of making a profile with links, they create a fairly inconspicuous one and then add profile links on a second (few days later) run. This way you've probably already checked over their profile and presumed they're legitimate.

To combat it I've actually stopped users from accessing the usercp until they reach ten posts, meaning they can't add profile links without posting and it's easy enough to recognise a bot when they post. Eventually I'll get round to just restricting homepage, but it didn't come as standard with MyBB.

 

I'll tell you a funny story...the spammer was talking to themselves in the same thread posting about their top 5 TV shows, and trying to promote the websites with it as well, more fool them since when I saw it, they felt the wrath of the spam cleaner & discouraged IPs

 

It's so funny when they make 10 posts, all quite good, and then start the spamming process.

I had something similar to that happen the other day, the guy kept double posting on a few threads, caught him, reset his posts, and banned.

 

Spammers are super fun (and they only get exponentially more determined to post crap on your site the bigger you get). This is what our forums look like to mods/admins (who can see deleted threads)...



The worst part is we have a TON of custom things in place to stop spammers (sometimes even before they post their first post). We automatically delete about 75 accounts that sign up per day because we think they MIGHT be spammers (before they even get to post). I couldn't imagine how awful it would be if we didn't have the custom stuff in place.

 

The staff sure does a great job. I don't believe I have even seen 1 spam post in your site over the past year.

 

Errrr... it depends on what you consider spam I suppose. I see lots of it (and delete them as I see them).

 

I agree. There are always pointless posts which could be considered as spam. But all sites have them, and it's impossible to catch them all.

But what I meant as spam was more towards advertisement.

 

Yeah, spammers are getting sneakier by the day. Every time I go to some forum there's some random guy who doesn't want to follow the rules. I mean what is up with the contradictory posts?

 

I just got this through my contact form on newer vBulletin install

Gorgeous webite? It's stock vB lmao -- too funny at at least I got a good laugh this morning.

 

Man, they crack me up sometimes. I had a spammer the other day. "I have a few favorite movies. My favorite movies are my favorite."
I'm like wtf.

 

Def. ESL