The recent spam attacks

It seems that our forum has become a target for spammers. (yes, that's what happens to popular forums)

We have a good spam protection in place called ReCAPTCHA which ensures that spambots cannot register. Unfortunately, these troublemakers are real humans who get paid to do a lot of work for nothing. They spend 15 minutes typing a post, we spend 15 seconds banning the crap out of that user and all his credentials.

I'd like to use this post to explain the reason behind spamming:

You'd think they want you to buy stuff from their website, but what they really want is only for you to click the link they post. They get paid for anyone that click their link. That's how the spamming business work. So by clicking a link on a spampost (even if you're just curious) it will basically mean: you give them money and they will continue to do this crap.

They can see in their logs that this forum is a referrer for links that are being clicked, and thus will put people in place to post more garbage on our forums.

So I want to ask you this:

To all members: Please don't click any of the links that spammers post, because it can even risk getting unwanted viruses on your computer. Next please report these posts.
To all staffmembers: Please remove the post as soon as possible to prevent guests/searchbots from clicking/following the links too. If you have the power to ban the user, please full-ban the user, the ip and everything else that has been given.

Is it actually possible to report those things? Thanks! I will use this function in the future... instead of just... well... what i did with aegag.

Aaaaaaand i am not supposed to reply to this post, am i? Crud!

You could've edited your own post, but if I didn't wanted you to reply, I would've locked the topic.

Wouldn't it be smarter for them to use a proxy, and a autorefresher or something?  

And what if they get smart and start posting the ads as links to levels?  

And what if they start cloaking links in their sigs (if they have them) and make it look harmless so people would click on them. 

this is scary

Wouldn't it be smarter for them to use a proxy, and a autorefresher or something?

Plenty of them do.

And what if they get smart and start posting the ads as links to levels?

They don't usually give the forums they're posting on more than a passing glance.  They know they'll be banned within the day anyway, so why bother?

And what if they start cloaking links in their sigs (if they have them) and make it look harmless so people would click on them.

That would require actually making an attempt to seem like a normal member.

Regardless of the content they post, it'll be deleted very soon after. We know that, they know that. So they won't be spending that much effort in their post and spreading. If they can run a script that makes all these changes, they'll do it, but ReCAPTCHA is preventing them from running a script. So the few that actually post here are manual jobs, and that means that they don't want to spend a minute more on a forum than they have to.

 

This... means... war! Or maybe it doesn't.

I guess you could call this a war, but the only war (or contest even) is that of who has the longest stroke of breath.

LPCHIP: You threaten my people with advertisements and spam.
SPAMMERS: This is madness!
LPCHIP: Madness? ...THIS. IS. NIFFLAAAAAS!! *kick*

LPCHIP: You threaten my people with advertisements and spam.
SPAMMERS: This is madness!
LPCHIP: Madness? ...THIS. IS. NIFFLAAAAAS!! *kick*

Moar leik *ban*

Quote from: Pumpkinbot on January 01, 2010, 21:53:12

LPCHIP: You threaten my people with advertisements and spam.
SPAMMERS: This is madness!
LPCHIP: Madness? ...THIS. IS. NIFFLAAAAAS!! *kick*

Moar leik *ban*

True.

LPCHIP: Madness? ...THIS. IS. NIFLAAAAAAS!! *banhammer'd into a hole*

...I should seriously make something like that. :U

quote from spam

spam may die 

quote from spam

spam may die 

xD I remember that.

Here's a smiley I made to summarize the situation: