Hi Nicholas. Apologies for all the spam. Unfortunately as of a month or so ago, the current levels of spam are "normal". I clean it as quick as I can, but some days a fair bit builds up overnight while I'm sleeping. We do have a number of anti-spam measures on the website (and according to the logs, the spam you see is nothing compared to what gets blocked).
Despite the repetitive nature of the spam content, I'm almost certain that these spammers are human (or at least very smart bots), as none of the existing tools I have at my disposal are helping. They also seem to constantly take Sunday off, which would be weird for a bot. We did have another third party spam service that was quite effective at least blocking the spam from being published, but it's code quality wasn't great and it ended up causing a huge array of issues so we had to disable it.
I have considered locking down new users to stop the spam, but that would have also blocked you from posting. I had hoped that there might have been a simple way to make all new user content unpublished by default (so at least then legitimate new user posts could be manually published), but it seems that our current software doesn't provide an easy way to do that out of the box.
In the background we are working on a tool that should help, but it's taking longer than I had anticipated. Hopefully I'll be able to roll that out next week (I'm pretty sure it's done, but I need to do some more testing before I set it loose on the real website).
TBH I'm not 100% sure whether it's an out-and-out scam, or whether they're a legitimate business with highly questionable business practices, or a blend of both (IMO it can often be hard to tell the difference).
Either way, I'm pretty sure that it works something like this:
Set up a website and/or call center for flight bookings, or whatever - that's the bit that I'm not 100% sure how legit it is - I suspect that some are vaguely legit and others out-and-out scams.
Buy google ads for all the keywords they want their ads to show up on.
Flood any/all forums (like ours) with spam. They have a pretty scatter gun approach and often cross link to other spam posts they've made on other forums (to increase the impression that they are organic cross-links). The spam posts always include the relevant phone number and links to their website; plus using all the keywords that they have purchased from google. Meaning their ads are more likely to be towards the top of a google search when someone googles something like "AIRLINE_BRAND customer service number".
As I noted, I'm fairly convinced that they are human spammers. If you look at the spam, whilst the targets change (e.g. airline brands supported, different software supported, different phone numbers and URLs, etc) the format of most of the posts is fairly consistent. So I'm pretty sure that it's "spam as a service". Probably some dodgy person in a developing country taking advantage of those who need the cash.
Thanks for your generous offer of assistance with the spam, but we're pretty fussy about who we allow to access our user data. You seem like a lovely person, but we don't know you enough to trust you with all that data! I hope you understand (hopefully you even appreciate it!).
Thanks for your generous offer of assistance with the spam, but we're pretty fussy about who we allow to access our user data. You seem like a lovely person, but we don't know you enough to trust you with all that data! I hope you understand (hopefully you even appreciate it!).
No worries - I wouldn't want anybody I'd only heard of last week poking around in my systems either.
I wasn't sure how separate the forum was from other data and/or what granularity you had over moderation, so it was easier to offer and be turned down than ask a whole load of suspicious sounding questions first!
No offence taken and all fully understood and appreciated.
Hi Nicholas, unfortunately yes at the moment
Hi Nicholas. Apologies for all the spam. Unfortunately as of a month or so ago, the current levels of spam are "normal". I clean it as quick as I can, but some days a fair bit builds up overnight while I'm sleeping. We do have a number of anti-spam measures on the website (and according to the logs, the spam you see is nothing compared to what gets blocked).
Despite the repetitive nature of the spam content, I'm almost certain that these spammers are human (or at least very smart bots), as none of the existing tools I have at my disposal are helping. They also seem to constantly take Sunday off, which would be weird for a bot. We did have another third party spam service that was quite effective at least blocking the spam from being published, but it's code quality wasn't great and it ended up causing a huge array of issues so we had to disable it.
I have considered locking down new users to stop the spam, but that would have also blocked you from posting. I had hoped that there might have been a simple way to make all new user content unpublished by default (so at least then legitimate new user posts could be manually published), but it seems that our current software doesn't provide an easy way to do that out of the box.
In the background we are working on a tool that should help, but it's taking longer than I had anticipated. Hopefully I'll be able to roll that out next week (I'm pretty sure it's done, but I need to do some more testing before I set it loose on the real website).
So deep apologies in the meantime.
No apology necessary! It's
No apology necessary! It's not your fault.
Honestly I was fascinated by the sheer volume of the posts and was trying to work out what they were trying to achieve.
If there's anything I can do to help, I'm happy to exercise my delete key on your behalf :-)
Nicholas.
They're trying to game Google Ad SEO
TBH I'm not 100% sure whether it's an out-and-out scam, or whether they're a legitimate business with highly questionable business practices, or a blend of both (IMO it can often be hard to tell the difference).
Either way, I'm pretty sure that it works something like this:
As I noted, I'm fairly convinced that they are human spammers. If you look at the spam, whilst the targets change (e.g. airline brands supported, different software supported, different phone numbers and URLs, etc) the format of most of the posts is fairly consistent. So I'm pretty sure that it's "spam as a service". Probably some dodgy person in a developing country taking advantage of those who need the cash.
Thanks for your generous offer of assistance with the spam, but we're pretty fussy about who we allow to access our user data. You seem like a lovely person, but we don't know you enough to trust you with all that data! I hope you understand (hopefully you even appreciate it!).
No worries...
No worries - I wouldn't want anybody I'd only heard of last week poking around in my systems either.
I wasn't sure how separate the forum was from other data and/or what granularity you had over moderation, so it was easier to offer and be turned down than ask a whole load of suspicious sounding questions first!
No offence taken and all fully understood and appreciated.
N.
Thanks! :)
Thanks! :)
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