Those of you more familiar with the workings of the internet will already know this, but it was a mystery to me why spammers bothered to join and create a blog just to hide a link to Crazy Birds, or whatever, that none of us was going to click anyway. AI educated me that all that is important to them is to have the link posted for as long as possible.
"Spammers often do not rely on forum members clicking their links for their strategy to work. Instead, simply having their links posted and indexed on active forum pages is enough to boost the search engine ranking of the linked sites."
That's why they like old threads where detection might be less likely. On the other hand, a recent member had three or four posts on new topics, but only one contained a link to bakeware she was pushing.
Stay vigilant.
Lots of Spam accounts these days or time wasters. The scurge is real!
Some dubious accounts go back years!
Moe, your post has sparked an idea... Surely it wouldn't be unworkable to give new accounts limited abilities that prevent them from including links?
Hopefully Floyd will chime in here...
Moe's observation is correct, that most of the time the spam isn't actually trying to get you, the forum member or visitor, to click on the link. The audience is Google. A huge component of how Google calculates ranking of a site is the number and quality of links pointing to it.
True commercial spammers work for shady SEO companies (SEO == "search engine optimization"), which is a very big industry. They get hired, say, by a window cleaning company in Dubai that wants to improve their search ranking. The spam agents then post dozens of posts on sites like this one using anticipated search phrases, things like "window cleaners in Dubai", that link to the target site. The expectation is then that when someone goes to Google and searches for "window cleaners in Dubai" Google will have calculated that since 30 sites link to the client's site using that phrase it must be a good recommendation and thus that company's site will appear near the top of the search results.
There are limits placed on new accounts already and I review flagged posts, comments, and accounts at least once a day, more often 3-4 times a day. Not every off topic or unhelpful post or comment is spam. I do my best to separate the wheat from the chaff but do make mistakes both ways: either too quick to delete oblique posts or accounts that I think are untrustworthy, or too slow to delete spam account before they post something egregious. I do my best to keep a finger on the pulse of the community and make adjustments to amount of friction in the system when necessary.
Thank you for keeping this site running!
Spam - that says it all. Enjoy!
I don't eat it, but once researched what's in it and, apparently, fairly high quality pork is used.
Years ago, The Kids In The Hall had a skit where a boy was in a butcher shop and asked the butcher what wieners were made from. The butcher said, dogs' ears and telephone books.
There's a line in the film The Great Outdoors about hot dogs that I won't repeat here, but you can search for yourself.
P.S. Spam is really popular in Hawaii and the Philippines.