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How to Spot a Forum Spammer: A Behavior-Driven Recognition Method



Forum spam consists of posts on Internet forums that contains related or unrelated advertisements, links to malicious websites, trolling and abusive or otherwise unwanted information. Forum spam is usually posted onto message boards by automated spambots or manually with unscrupulous intentions with intent to get the spam in front of readers who would not otherwise have anything to do with it intentionally.


Forum spambots surf the web looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and any other web forms to submit spam links to. These spambots often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs present. Some messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing. These automated schemes can make it more difficult for users to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Some spam messages also simply contain tags and hyperlinks intended to boost search engine ranking rather than target human readers.




How to Spot a Forum Spammer



Most forum spam consists of links to external sites with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive advertising domains such as weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Some of these links may contain code to track the spambot's identity so that if a sale goes through then the spammer behind the spambot can collect a commission.


Spam posts may contain anything from a single link to dozens of links. Text content is minimal, usually innocuous and unrelated to the forum's topic. Sometimes the posts may be made in old threads that are revived by the spammer solely for the purpose of spamming links. Posts may include some text to prevent the post being caught by automated spam filters that prevent posts which consist solely of external links from being submitted.


Alternatively, the spam links are posted in the user's signature, in which case the spambot will never post. The link sits quietly in the signature field, where it is more likely to be harvested by search engine spiders than discovered by forum administrators and moderators.


Since November 2006, a very destructive forum and wiki spam attack has been propagated by inserting into comments redirect domains with an automated posting script like XRumer. These domains redirect a user to pornographic websites. If a user clicks on the image or attempts to close the Website an ActiveX codec will be downloaded as a Zlob Trojan. The spambot can often bypass many of the safeguards administrators use to reduce the amount of spam posted.


Spam prevention and deletions measurably increase the workload of forum administrators and moderators. The amount of time and resources spent keeping a forum spam-free contributes significantly to labor cost and the skill required in the running of a public forum.[1] Marginally profitable or smaller forums may be permanently closed by administrators.


Provide information on advertising and partnering opportunities you might offer and make it clear in your community guidelines what is and what is not acceptable promotion. This can help with accidental spammers who are trying to legitimately sell something to your audience.


We provide details of those reported as spammers, those that persist in abusing forums and blogs with their scams, ripoffs, exploits and other annoyances. We provide these lists so that you don't have to endure the never ending job of having to moderate, filter and delete their rubbish.


I have a forum on a website I master, which gets a daily dose of pron spam. Currently I delete the spam and block the IP. But this does not work very well. The list of blocked IP's is growing quickly, but so is the number of spam posts in the forum.


In my experience, the best easy defenses come from just doing something "non-standard". If you make your site non-standard, this makes it so that any automated spam would have to be coded specifically for your site, which (no offense) probably isn't worth the effort. Note that if the spam is coming from human spammers, there's not really anything you can do that won't also stop legitimate posters. So the goal is to find a solution that will throw away any "standard" posts - that is, "fill out the whole form and push submit".


Don't let anybody post until they respond to an email sent to their registered email address. You'll see lots of forums and mailing lists generate a unique email address or web url that is sent to the new user's given email address, and they have to respond to the email or click on the link to finalize their registration.


The easiest thing I've done to stop spammers with (so far) 100% consistency is to validate the text that was submitted. If you use the php function strstr() to check for "a href" or even a non-clickable http or www, you can then just reroute the spammer elsewhere. I actually have a script then write to my .htaccess file to deny the offending IP address. Not sure if there's any other kind of spam to be concerned about, but links are all I've seen so far.


The moderators usually take care of that eventually as there are allot of spammers that think that they are great to post all sorts on our forum and make themselves look silly, it will be deleted eventually.


Thank you. So, there is no way to report a spammer, right? But how moderators themselves can identify a spam message? They read EVERY message on the forum? impossible. So I doubt your answer. Could you suggest something else?


What can only be described as an epic new analysis by a cadre of researchers at UC San Diego has uncovered the seedy underbelly of a sophisticated, highly automated, world-wide network of services that help email, blog and forum spammers get past the CAPTCHAS that are designed to keep them out.


The results of this landmark study show that a number of sites, including those run by Microsoft, AOL, Google and the widely use reCaptcha, are regularly compromised by spammers employing these services.


I notice that the spammer accounts are now blocked, but that the spam is still published. Why don't you use the option that unpublishes and/or deletes content published by that account at the same time?


When I researched the exit node for the tor circuit I was given, I saw that it was a forum spammer. Even after changing my identity , the new exit node was still listed as a forum spammer. Is this common with tor or dangerous ? I was using the Tor browser for linux.


This is just the nature of blacklisting and it's not dangerous to you personally while using Tor, however you may find it inconvenient. This is the price of anonymity, you are indistinguishable from spammers (without further verification, e.g. a captcha-based solution).


You can get answers directly from the developer in our forum. You need an active Visforms subscription or an active subscription for the Bootstrap Carousel module if you want to ask questions about the corresponding extension in our forum. Please log in with the relevant user first.


As you can see, there are some decent options available to enable you to fight the battle against forum spammers. Do your part, help the world be a better place, and tighten up your forum by getting rid of the spam!


You will have to registerorlogin(See top or bottom of page) before you can post a message or view images: click the appropriate link to proceed. To start viewing messages,select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.


Just got your brand new Tier X tank? Still being penned by lower tier tanks? Did you just hear that familar penetration and 'burn sound' when that pesky T-54 just drilled round after round of HEAT into your supposedly unpenetrable hull??? It's the scourge of so many tankers out there, you work so hard to get so far yet random people will happily throw gold (quite literally in some cases...) at you. Bloody gold spammers, how rude! So what do you do? Take to the chat and yell 'cheat', 'gold spammer', 'noob', 'gold spammer', 'cheat', 'gold spammer' etc etc. In some case you've been so mad that you even take to the chat afterwards and privately rip into them saying how they must'nt be a very good player for using gold. Jerks.


Pretty much all tanks in WOTB have three ammunition types, standard (AP or APCR), premium (HEAT, APCR or HESH) and high-explosive (HE) - see the 'newcomers guide' section of the forums if you have no idea what I'm talking about here. The great thing about these options is that the good people at WG have provided you, the player, with the option to set your ammunition load to whatever you like! Brilliant!!! Just slide the respective slider to whatever you feel is right for your tank and play style, and there you go, simple! Brilliant!!! By default, premium ammo will cost you gold, but once again the clever people at WG give you the option to change how you pay for it, so just tap under where it says 'shell price', and voila, you now pay for premium ammo using credits! Brilliant!!! Now, you'll note in the example below (my T-54) that premium ammo costs nearly 4 x as much as standard AP - well, you're getting far better penetration with HEAT, which combined with the T-54's excellent mobility and armour, you end up with a very formidable unit. Brilliant!!!


We have this conversation all the time on the EU server forum, and I would say most experienced players will agree that APCR/HEAT/HESH ammo is a useful tool and part of the game. I've only been called a "gold spamming noob" once, and in that situation, he was right on all counts, except of course I hadn't actually paid gold for it. I am a noob compared to him, and in that situation, I could have pentrated with a standard AP shell.


Armour penetration - Medium tank is a compromise, but German heavies were designed (not always really built) without compromise - with virtually impenetrable armour. That is, not penetrable by the existing anti tank guns at the effective firing distance of their gun. Lower plate was thinner and at specific angle not to be a weakspot, but to be impenetrable based on expected distance and incoming shell trajectory. 2ff7e9595c


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