H
Haris12
Guest
Am Haris here.Am new member to this community.Am interested in astrology.Looking forward to spend a precious time here.
Could someone please explain to my old hick mind just what is the purpose of spam? I used to eat it as a kid and liked it but Momma has broken me of canned food.Now i see people throwing the stuff all over the internet.Hell give it to the cat,Morris will eat anything,never believe commercials.
Really I am curious,joking aside.What is the purpose of spam?Could someone enlighten me? Sometimes they are trying to sell something and at other times you just get totally irrelevant posts like this one about astrology on a board about the Barrens??? I see no purpose here.Am I missing something? There are plenty of Astrology Boards out there for sure.
I'm a moderator at a busy website and we see these posts every day. This is what we would call a "foot in the door" post. The spammer makes an innocuous post like that, maybe makes a few more in the future. Later on, they come back and edit their posts to insert links. This is often done with invisible text that will not be noticed. The idea is that the links will be be read by "search bots" for Google and others.
The spammers think that these links will increase their Google search ratings - in other words, that the site in their link will appear higher in the list of search results. Whether or not that really works seems a little questionable today, since Google is getting a little "smarter" about these things.
Haris12 has not done a very good job since the message is poorly written and completely off topic for this site. Some of them are better, often they copy and paste from other posts on the site. Or they make a post to an existing thread along the lines of "I agree, this is very good! I would also like to visit the beautiful Oswego River!" Typically these spammers are from China, India, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
I have inserted a secret message in my "horoscope post" above. Can you see it? Would you have realized that it was added? (just drag your cursor over the message to highlight it) This became such a problem over at gpsreview that we had to limit the time during which users could edit their messages to a very short window.
The spammers think that these links will increase their Google search ratings - in other words, that the site in their link will appear higher in the list of search results. Whether or not that really works seems a little questionable today, since Google is getting a little "smarter" about these things.
Haris12 has not done a very good job since the message is poorly written and completely off topic for this site. Some of them are better, often they copy and paste from other posts on the site. Or they make a post to an existing thread along the lines of "I agree, this is very good! I would also like to visit the beautiful Oswego River!" Typically these spammers are from China, India, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
I have inserted a secret message in my "horoscope post" above. Can you see it? Would you have realized that it was added? (just drag your cursor over the message to highlight it) This became such a problem over at gpsreview that we had to limit the time during which users could edit their messages to a very short window.
Thanks for the link 46er and the post Boyd.I now know the why of Spam.Another example of the sad human condition I suppose.
The thing I find sad is that these spammers are from countries with a lot of poverty and generally low standards of living. It wouldn't be worth the effort for us to go to all this trouble, but evidently the few pennies income it generates are enough to attract these people. And I also wonder whether the spammers themselves are the victims of some kind of scam that promises money but never pays off?
Most are from spambots and they hijack IP addresses to do their dastardly deeds. Very hard to track and defend against. The most successful sites to block them use logon's and those 'key it now' codes that you you can't easily read. At least I can't, always have to do a recycle. 
I block a frightenly large amount of spam bots from signing up now.
I may start blocking by country as well.
I may start blocking by country as well.
It's probably the most effective tool they have left, when they can get away with it. Google has been getting a lot smarter about ranking "content farm" sites, but when a spammer manages to slip links into a legit message board it's really hard to tell that they should be disregarded. Since the core behavior of page rank is to index links according to how people describe them when posting them, this technique can work really well.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...ed-the-plug-on-the-peak-district-8669204.html
Interesting article of "unnatural links' leading to Google dropping sites from search queries.
Interesting article of "unnatural links' leading to Google dropping sites from search queries.
Seems like there must be more to that story. But Google can be pretty opaque. A few years ago when I was doing video, they pulled one of our YouTube clips, citing a user complaint. There was certainly nothing offensive and we had all the necessary permissions, just like all the other videos we had posted. I looked at all the Google FAQ's and couldn't find anything relevant.
So our PR dept contacted Google and they couldn't (or wouldn't) say what the complaint was and said we didn't have any recourse.
So our PR dept contacted Google and they couldn't (or wouldn't) say what the complaint was and said we didn't have any recourse.
Boyd, did YouTube or yourself want to run an ad with the video. They will drop a video if there is a copyright issue of any kind. Something as simple as a tiny visible label will trigger policing. I have been flagged doing Google+ chats because of a case of Coke was used in a video someone had on screen to demonstrate how they assembled something in their garage. The cases of Coke could be seen in the background.