Holy shit, the first 6 pages of the Video Games forum are all spam. Yeah, this is bad.
Official Report Thread
- Thread starter JoJo
- Start date
Been for a week or two now, but they've mostly been invading Forum Games so far, so it wasn't as noticeable.
Anyway, some names to scrub: @Srdfilo33, @xfddesz, @Johnbrucce, @tammanadaul, @mdsaifulislam, @dibakar11,
- Mar 31, 2010
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Thanks guys! Please do keep reporting them, it makes them much quicker to identify and clean-up.
All new users on the forum require manual approval and I think the uptick is in part because the automated system we have that flags up bots has become less effective recently. I could become harsher on who I accept into the forum since right now I give unflagged users the benefit of the doubt, even though most turn out to be bots rather than actual new users. This would of course come at the cost of turning away some of the few geninue newcomers we still get here. Thoughts?
All new users on the forum require manual approval and I think the uptick is in part because the automated system we have that flags up bots has become less effective recently. I could become harsher on who I accept into the forum since right now I give unflagged users the benefit of the doubt, even though most turn out to be bots rather than actual new users. This would of course come at the cost of turning away some of the few geninue newcomers we still get here. Thoughts?
Out of interest (and im not sure that you have the stats) how many people register to join? How many of them become actual contributing members?
This has become quite a tight-nit group. I can't really remember the last time I saw a new face around here.
Pitifully few, I'm guessing. ExtraWildGames is the only one I can think of who actually posts.
Conversely, there's about a dozen regulars I think have dropped of in the past year or so.
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I don't have any stats I'm afraid but I'm with Chimpzy that it seems very few newcomers have stuck around for the past few years.
What new users? We get like 1 a year that sticks around, hardly seems worth the spam. It'd be nice if there was some way to add some additional approval process, like they are restricted to only posting in the introduction thread and need to make a coherent post about their favorite game or something for full access, but I don't know what kind of power you have.
This is beginning to feel like a intentional attack on this site. Just yesterday, JoJo cleaned up Video Games, and already back to +6 pages of spam.
I assume this is impossible, but a system I thought about to outsource the spambot killing would be that members that have joined recently (say within the last month) are easier to have their posting privileges withdrawn. What I'm thinking is that if one of these recent members have been flagged as spam by at least 5 old-timers (say those that have been a member over two years and have posted at least 2000 times) their ability to make new posts is withdrawn until you have taken a look on them and determined whether they were humans or just spambots.
That or limiting how many threads new members can post for the first month or so, but I suspect that will only make them clog up the proper threads. But I assume these solutions requires a change in the code and this forum is not important enough for the current The Escapist leadership to spend money on changing.
Good lord, you weren't kidding. I don't check in on the major forums for maybe a day or two and suddenly all I see is a spam wall. The skeptic in me feels like this has to be targeted, but that might be reaching, I don't know.
Given how few people we see sticking around after signing up, I do feel like things need to be tighter when it comes to new user sign ups. Sucks as much as it does, this is excessive at this point, and one has to weigh whether it's better to let the forums become completely unusable for everyone here due to spam, or turn away some potential legitimate users at the door (that may not have actually stuck around to begin with) and let the place actually be usable by who is here currently.
There's gotta be some sort of back-end feature, toggle, coding, whatever else that can make it easier to work out who is legitimate and who isn't. The others have made some good suggestions. I wish I had some. All I've got is my opinion on the matter, however much that's worth
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The problem is, we're being run with a skeleton crew, and I don't know how much access they have to the backend stuff.
The bots have been cleared out of Video Games, for now. Posting to let Jojo know I've noticed and appreciate the work he does for us.
History repeats itself.
Thanks for everything @JoJo.
I will do my best to be on the look out for bots.
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I don't believe it's targeted in a sense that someone's intentionally trying to harm the forums, but it's definitely a particularly virulent new breed of bots which appear to be coming from the same source and unlike previous bots, don't give up after one or two threads.
Unfortunately, I don't have the access to change anything in the backend so going forward, I will be much more selective about who I approve. It may take a while to see results since these bots often wait a couple of weeks after being approved before letting loose with the spam. I've cleared up a lot of new accounts in the background which IP match known spammers but may be more lurking out there.
Ok, I'm a little confused here. If the plan is to flood the zone in hopes one in a million is gullible enough to click the link, and then yet more gullible enough to get scammed, then making that link tiny, out of the way, and poorly visible in dark mode, seems kind of counterproductive.
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I would hazard a guess that the hope is to increase the visibility of the linked site on search engines by planting links on other websites.
I've been flagging the posts they've been making as from "spam bots" with the report button. Is that less effective these days than listing out the names here?
Much as it galls me to say it, I actually have some insight into this.
The long and short of it is that it's a "black hat" off-page SEO tactic. See, Search Engines don't just recommend your page based off of "did they say something relevant to this search". It uses a complex algorithm that recommends sites based off a synthesis of factors, including site relevance, content topicality, perceived authority, and reputation. And one of the components feeding into those factors is what we call "backlinks" (other sites linking back to your site).
The catch is that getting a good backlink is both very hard and very time consuming. Like "requires a lot of cold call outreach humbly suggesting ways that name dropping your product - like in a CNET 'listicle' - would be good content for them, and you should only expect a 5-15% success rate." And as a further wrinkle, Search Engines get suspicious if it looks like you paid for the backlinks (and didn't flag them as such so that search engine can deemphasize them) either monetarily or through link trading. They want them to be organic and based on merit. And they will penalize you if they think your backlink profile is suspicious.
Thing is...it's also a bit of an open secret that buying backlinks is still extremely common. Usually not in the form of directly purchasing it from the hosted site, but in the form of outsourcing it to agencies or freelancers. Now, many of these play by the rules and use white hat tactics. But a lot of them - particularly those which 'guarantee' a lot of backlinks, often for a pittance - those black hat tactics result in a toxic backlink profile. Yes, they created all those backlinks, but most of them get taken down by the site admins within a day or so, and the quality of the links generated are so bad and the tactics so brazen that it hurts rather than helps the client site.
There's a solid analogy here to "buying site traffic", which is usually achieved the same way a DDOS attack is: By flooding the site with bots. Granted, a DDOS does it to overload the site, while buying traffic scales it down to 'survivable' levels because it only wants to use the bots to trick analytics programs into thinking a lot of people visited the site. But while the goal is different, the method is pretty much the same. And that makes it a very dishonest way to 'increase site traffic'. Yes, you can say the site got a lot more 'hits', but they're literally false positives and not actually useful for the client.
Returning to the topic at hand, when someone promises you a high volume of backlinks, that's a big red flag, and usually means that they'll 'accomplish' this through what we call "link building bots", which are designed to do exactly what we've been seeing: join forums and comment in blogs and spam them with content that includes links to the client site. This allows them to technically say that they produced "X" backlinks, but they're functionally worse than worthless because not only do modern forums automatically include the nofollow attribute to user posted links, those posts will they quickly be flagged as suspicious by Search Engines, which will then penalize the client.
And moreover, for posts like those, the only ones that can be expected to survive - so to speak - will mostly be on neglected boards, which Search Engines don't like anyways. Standard procedure for backlinks is not just creating quality backlinks on good sites, it's culling toxic backlinks from less reputable ones. And this method primarily creates toxic backlinks.
TLDR: The point isn't that people click the backlink, it's that the page has the backlink. It's a counterproductive tactic that relies on a superficial understanding of how backlinks work.
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