Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion why?

Not sure what the nature of these are, but in the case of something like the Nigerian scam, it was found that the more obvious they made their spam look like a scam, the more it paid off. Apparently, only the dumbest, most gullible people replied, and so the scammers spent their time more efficiently, rather than wasting time on people who were unlikely to pay.

This spammer is looking for a phone call as a next step in the scam, so I expect the same dynamic applies.

As comedy fodder, they're priceless. Anyone wanna "Be free from enemy 2nd wife"? Or, "Attract any GirlBoy towards you with heart"?

In my experience, it's often Pakistani IP addresses these days.

Er-- or Indonesian.

{sigh}

Once in a while, you'll get someone using a 'virgin' IP address (or family of them) that hasn't been flagged in SPAM indices, and they can do-- well, this-- until you ban them and flag them in one of the SPAM registries.

Forum spam is a major headache, let me just add, even with a top-notch filter that weeds out a lot of them.

Oh-- and the other thing that happens is that occasionally, spammers are looking to exceed some number of posts so that they 'unlock' forum features-- like member lists, which (hopefully, from their perspective) include e-mail addresses. Selling them is worth some money.

Of course, in this arms race, most forum administrators are now wise to this, and even with hundreds of posts, that kind of info just isn't available to regular members of a forum.

At my site, we still allow members to share their e-mail addresses, but the threshold for seeing them is pretty significant-- and the threshold for viewing some of the private places in the forum is, as well. Very few of them make it through to that level.

But a few try every month.

We had a problem with spam two or three years ago, and it was resolved by putting posts from new users into a moderation queue, as Howdy noted. I've been wondering if that policy has been discontinued. I hope not.

My guess is that they found a back door means around it. (This is the problem with automating post-count related member categories.)

We still moderate the first three posts of every new user, however they have figured out how to post beyond that. We are working on a way to solve this.

Good luck.

I have a suggestion - indigo posted above that the post count is several per hour over a period of time. So, you could add a filter to the spam detector that if the same/similar IPs (or messages following a similar theme) post more than a certain number of messages per hour (e.g. 10/hour), their messages should be automatically "quarantined" in a queue before an admin/moderator releases them.

Flooding controls, yes.

(Our forum uses them, but it's a shorter time-frame and a rate that is more like 2 per minute or something.) A very determined/desperate person COULD still do it, but it wouldn't be very lucrative.

Generally forum spammers are low-paid virtual sweatshop help, and they get paid by the link/post, often very, very little per post (think pennies at the outside).

A combination approach works pretty well, incidentally-- that is, have post-controls that top out at some number of posts on the forum in order to show up at all... and/or flood controls, and/or regional/aggressive spam filtering, and/or control usergroups so that you have to manually move new members into more privileged membergroups (that way spammers can't defeat the post-count thing through sheer persistence).