Another spam posted….

Thanks so much for letting us know and for your fun response! 

Let me use this as an educational opportunity that we can all use to help keep the forum clean of such things.

Most of the spam comes from automated software or people hired to place spam on forums and in blog comments.

One scenario is from services that charge other companies a fee to get their site or product better ranking in Google search. Since Google looks at links to a site as one measure of popularity, they try to spam links everywhere possible. The companies who hire these services usually have no idea that underhanded practices will be taking place on their behalf.

The other common scenario is someone who creates a bunch of websites, fills them with garbage content, and then tries to get people to come there and click the ads, which they get paid for. They then use software or hire people to spam forums with their links.

You can see why none of that spam usually sounds natural even when they search out posts on particular topics to spam. The people or software doing the dirty work really have no knowledge of the topic or the site. Many of the people are from poor nations and are paid a pittance per link.

We have software that watches our site and automatically blocks lots of spam. The software works really well and blocks hundreds of attempts per week. If we didn’t have it the forum would be totally overrun with spam. Occassionally, it blocks a good message and occasionally spam slips through, both of which we look out for and fix manually as needed.

Most of the big spammers have software that comes back and checks to see if their messages and links are still in place. By quickly removing them we take away their incentive to do more.

That’s where all of you come in. When you let us know, we can quickly take care of it. The best way to let us know is through our contact form because that gets to one of us even if we haven’t been reading the forum. But we’re grateful to be notified any way that works for you. (We used to have a “report this” button to make it super easy but had to remove it because of technical limitations. We’ll get back to that one of these days.)

As you may have guessed from the description of how these schemes work, none of the spammers will every read any responses you leave. All they care about is if their link is in place and that’s checked by software. So Sue, as much as we got a chuckle out of your response, it didn’t affect the spammers at all. But at least it makes all of us feel better.

Yeah me too. Funny!