Spam accounts

Seems like there are a lot of spam accounts running around the forum.
There are the obvious ones, which just ramble on about very irrelevant information. These are usually really easy to spot, since they have a ton of url’s and such in the messages…

Then there are the other ones. How do you identify them? I’ve seem some that ‘spam’ in one thread, but in another they seem to be talking about pretty much the same thing. These are the ones that confuse me… A lot. Is it some kind of nifty Messageboard-camouflague? Whats even more confusing is that they arent really advertising anything, so what’s their purpose?

Anyway, they made me curious.

How do you, webmasters/admins/mods, tell them apart?

Here’s one thing that’s happening in India (and other places I’m sure)

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1835

There are some pretty complex softwares out there that auto-spam message boards, and can even fill in relevant information.

Easiest way to spot them IMO is looking for a signature or link to some website thats responsible for selling something.

Also bumping up a bunch of dead threads with a common keyword and then posting the same or very similar posts in a very short time. Pretty easy to do a “search for all posts by user” and see if they’re a happily active new user or just a spambot.

Agree on the bumping up of dead threads. Also when you log on as much as we moderators do and all of a sudden almost every forum has a new message.

That said, we as moderators, are always looking for these but as stated above they can sometimes be crafty.

We do have a hidden moderators forum and one of the topics that is always being discussed is spam.

Yup, we’re on it. I think we catch all spam pretty much within a few hours or so of being posted, depending on the time. I’m on the boards checking new posts almost continually throughout the day, so I notice any new posts and catch anything suspicious. Since we delete spam manually (as well as have filters), not much goes un-noticed (ie. spammers that post one real message and one spam one, or post spam to old threads).

If you do see spam that we haven’t caught yet you can also use the “report” button (yield triangle button at top right of post), which will highlight it for us.

R

Yeah, it was when I was half way to reporting a message that i got confused and curios.

But when i see those half-generic messages they just confuse me in to thinking that either I’ve lost my English, or that this user is struggling with grammar. (Or just simply using google translate)