Talk:Forum spam

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject Malware, an attempt to better organise information in articles related to Malware. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

Contents 1 Spam without links 2 Flawed? 3 Freebase Email? 4 Customization 5 Merging Newsgroup spam, Forum spam and Spam in blogs 6 Page protected: edit request

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)