Is it over? Is it safe to post now?Follow

The life of a Mod is a thankless one.

I've never been able to stop the foriegn ones entirely. The domestic ones are easier to get shut off at the ISP level if they are idiots, or through alternative channels if they aren't. IP Tree and the user account triage tools let us chain kill spam accounts pretty quick, and find anything that someone made on a pre-staged basis. My favorite one was the time where some idiot managed to create 3,000+ user accounts for spamming, and we were able to ban every single one of them before he got a chance to use more than 3 or 4 of them because even though he used a proxy to spam, he used his clean IP to create them in the first place.

Anymore half of them get paid based on how many spam posts they make, without regard to how long the ads stay. The other half of the persistant ones are usually scammers looking for credit card info. For the ones that are legitimate companies in the ads, I usually send them a warning letter advising them to cease and desist before the formal better buisiness burro complaint (yeah I can't spell buearo or whatever the hell it is) etc. We very rarely get repeat spam from those, and I like to think we cost some SEO idiot person somewhere some money. But you run into a few every once in a while that are just really, really dense.

This guy will eventually get caught. He is hitting things too much with things illegal enough that the feds will eventually look into it. We're not the only gaming board he is hitting judging by a quick search of some of the repetitive text I see when I go looking for it, but the end isn't going to be for a while unfortunatly. Before they got shunted to forum 999 (spammer hell) there were about 800 topic spams in OOT during the past month. They like the multi gaming forum a bit more, but this one is the one they hit second most often. They largely leave the asylum alone. I don't know why. Link visibility maybe? Tech support, book forum and the other gaming main forums get most of the other spam, though there is a fair amount of trying to sneak ads in on the comment system items as well.

Average life expectancy of a spammed post around here is about 1 minute if you factor in the overnight ones and average it. The most successful spammers post between 2:00 am and 6:30 am pacific standard time. I expect this spammer to slow down some when we expand the anti-spam autoblocker to cover India, but I also don't think he is checking his results otherwise he would have given up already. Why risk the crime for no reward? which leads me to believe this spammer is an idiot, but one with enough technical knowledge to be a pain in the ***.

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pay someone over there $5 to cut the phone line, problem solved.


Just say BBB, if someone doesn't understand then they suck at google.

Just so you know, that's a euphemism.