Why is Steve getting Spammed?

[Neblasian]

Hi,

Is it me or is Steve getting spamed more often. This morning there was this post about an ipod for sale in numerous threads. About a month or so I saw similar spam mail. I know this is not a lot by a stretch; but, for this site, it is. I have been a member on this forum for more than a year and have never seen such annoying occurrences, except from some legal members . I just want to know why Steve is getting hit like this now?


Neblasian

[WanderingOak]

I've seen numerous spamming attempts over the past few years. It could be that you are just noticing it more. Personally, I fail to see the point of forum spamming, as nobody in his right mind would buy anything from one, unless it is being done for purely nuisance purposes.

[Brutha]

The forum is indeed getting spammed but that is nothing new. We ban on average 1-2 accounts per day for obvious spamming like the ipod spam.

As moderators we try to delete those spam posts as fast as possible but sometimes it takes a while till a moderator notices a spam post and during that time users like you can see the spam.
If you see a spam post it helps us when you click: Report post. That way a moderator will notice the spam faster and can delete it.

I think most of the spam is from bots and it costs the person who is responsible for the spam a very little to spam a lot of forums at the same time. It's like email spam. Most people won't respond but as long as every 50.000th person takes some action the spammer will profit.

[Savage]

As Brutha said the mods are pretty fast at nuking spam and banning spammer's accounts. We also catch a lot of disguised/tricky spam where people create multiple accounts. One account asks for a recommendation, and another account posts follow-up messages to spam links. A recent example was someone spamming links about Lasik surgery by starting bogus threads about it. Fortunately we have a great team of mods as well as alert members who help keep spam to a minimum.

When it comes to spam, the forums have it really light compared to what the blog sees. So far my trackback/pingback spam filter (Askimet) has already nuked more than 60,000 spam messages. Imagine if I had to check all those manually. It would be well into the hundreds of thousands if I still had comments enabled on the blog.

[Brutha]

So far my trackback/pingback spam filter (Askimet) has already nuked more than 60,000 spam messages.

The new vBulletin will support Askimet. That could make the forum more spam free.