The sworn enemy of my forums have always been Spammers. But gone are the golden days of the easily machine detectable plea to buy male enhancement products in broken English – today we have something much more diabolical.
The Art Of Text Recycling
Take a look at this post to our forums:
Now, before you pour your heart into helping “Stella” achieve her dream, look at this:
Yup, it’s relevant text that was stolen from a Yahoo! Answers post.
It looks like a totally legitimate question. It’s the correct topic, posted into the correct area. Our spam detection system (Akismet) failed to flag it.
What if Automated Next-Gen spammers start doing things like:
- Text recycle a post
- Wait a week or so, giving time for innocent dupes to make replies to your original post
- Come back and add your spam URL to your forum signature, or possibly the post itself
Actually I think I have seen the above happen a few times recently. Meh, annoying.
I saw something interesting/offensive on LD. Check out the trackbacks on here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2009/05/06/ludum-dare-14-time-lapse-videos/#comments . A set of sites that all have a post that is a straight copy of the GameSetWatch post. Some of them are polite enough to state the original source. But man, these sites exist just to do that? How wrong is that?
Hi mr Robinson I m korean and fan of dink smallwood !
I m first playing this game in 2002 (korean elementary school 6 grade)
after I have been playing d-mod
today I played again dink smallwood and all clear
robinson. You created my game of rememberance
I respect you robinson see you later
As i see it, there in the long run really is no way out except of making membership-registration non-cheap and non-instant. Imagine this: 10sec hashcash and 3hour wait before you can post. Obviously, thats gonna turn off legitimate users, which quickly want to drop one post, get a reply, and then never will be see again. But on the other hand, it also is something way too expensive for spammers. Spammers rely on mass-distribution of spam… if the distribution becomes expensive enough, then that requirement is gone. And theoretically, the site owner has the upper hand in this, because what a normal user only has to endure once, a spambot has to endure thousands of times.