So just curious about what other people think about the sudden increase, or apparent increase, in spam bots posting. Particularly all of this “True Blood” stuff…
What do I think? Job security. 
There are filters in place–you guys don’t see a good chunk of the spam that gets caught. We do our best to delete them–usually we can get it out in a couple of minutes when we see it ourselves or someone reports it.
(But do us a favor, reply “reported” once you report it so our emails don’t get bombarded with the same post.)
But don’t quote the reported spam, because then we’d have to delete two posts. Thanks.
Gary, I’d almost rather both posts got deleted…
Yes…
Please follow that instruction.
Anyone else thinking about team 180 after reading the title
Actually, we are seeing about the same number of spam attacks as normal. They seem to peak on certain days of the week but when looked at over a longer period they seem to be about the same. Haven’t seen any berry extract spam in a while, or WOW Gold either. We get them all in the end.
I must say the most random spam I’ve seen was from today, being the “replica hand bags”. I’ll give the bot credit for being concise in it’s spam…
I wonder what team Randall Munroe was on.
That replica handbags spam was really the strangest yet… not exactly spamming the right crowd here haha
Wow, there was a lot of spam today. Just one single spam bot posted 4 different spam threads. I think that another one posted two different spam threads.
THE SPAM BOT IS RISING!
I wonder what the analytic hierarchy would look like if a Firefox (e.g.) plugin captured all of the jump points (referrer HTTP jumps) when clicking on a spam link. Then at the end, the plugin wouldn’t let the final page actually load. It could be a “spam” mode used to capture data about the data-capturers.
There may be a potential common URL in all of the jumps among the spam posts such that if a pre-posting analysis was done of all URL’s in a post before the post went live, the post could be marked as spam and put in a “posts for review” for the moderators to evaluate. If the post was by a known member, then it could be allowed (a lot of the live stream feeds have spam-like HTTP referrers).
Sounds like a way one of our Computer Science undergrads could contribute some time back to the community (and get possibly become famous for too, heh).