[rerevisionist]

Note on forum spam

For couple of years now, forums have been plagued with spammers using automated spamming programs. The idea is to post messages on forums, usually containing links to their sites, which may be selling consumer goods, property in hard-to-shift areas, drugs, sex images, what have you. The messages, and their titles, are usually computer-generated. If they're lucky, the forum will be spidered and their site link count increased. Probably it's too much trouble for them to write a standard message; so most are generated from a dictionary of phrases, with some standard format. The phrases may be taken from the same site, to try to make the messages fit the site. Counter-spam programs allow banning by IP address, email, and name. Typical names are like these: Spredogrek, GTAZwerEDC, Gromisilsss, Aikvgbvn, BuyCiproUS, irinapefraumenas, OnlinePharma, BuyNeximu. People who try to log in with odd names may be deleted!

no-log.org seems to be an untraceable email source; dispostable.com claims instant disposable email addresses.

Over Christmas 2011, we tried permitting these obvious spammers, basically to see what would happen. Most of them posted nothing. Generally there wasn't much activity; it's a slack period anyway. In descending order of activity---

[1] Computer-generated junk messages with many links to websites [Junk messages like "...we went out of the closet concerning shopping, an eye to it was the weekend and all of us had a allotment of free time. We walked a desire space and slogan that there was a sales advocacy of. Temporarily, I had a intellect to secure jackets because of celebratory cost today..."] These websites may be fraudulent - it's easy enough to mimic entire websites, copy the ad graphics and so on, and hope to catch peoples' credit card money. Some of the sites themselves had computer-generated or machine translated text- but of course they could be genuine. Presumably most potential buyers were able to discern the foreign flavour of the text. Most of these were clothing sites (or handbags, toys..); the goods may exist, but be fakes - I don't know. They seemed mostly very warm, winter-type clothing so very likely they had unsold stocks to unload.

[2] Messages with just one link, typically a short URL disguising the total URL, for example some porn link.

[3] No posts - but links to MSN, ICQ, MSNM, WLM, AIM, jabber & whatever addresses. One of these was a blog - badly written material apparently related to home surveillance. Another was wind power. Another was a wedding site. Another was real estate in Bulgaria. If there are no posts, these people may remain for a long time, presumably getting occasional hits.

[4] No websites or communications sites listed, but the email address may show up on Google. For example, there was a Russian news site bk dot ru, and a Polish site go2 dot pl though presumably not mainstream. Gmail seems to do nothing to remove spam emailers; there was a 'cellulite' site, an Israeli claiming to be a gold dealer, a Feng Shui thing, a site intended to be found by people mistyping celebrity names. We found a "company has years of experience producing fake passports and other identity documents."