What is it about spammers ...

[Nathan Caroland]

I have to say that one of the biggest things that bothers me these days, particularly as a business owner and a website operator, is spammers.

Since the creation of Wyrd we have always had individuals creating bogus accounts and thankfully, very few of them have managed to get a post up without it being killed by a moderator within the first few minutes of it coming onto the site.

Then we did some upgrades to the site and WHAM, I knocked out about 95% of the spam bots and with a few more tweaks, got it so that a 100% of the spam posts that do manage to make it through never made it to public. Then I added a few more measures and and not only did that curb them, it pretty much stopped them.

Now that was for bots, mostly you add in a few questions here and there that they have to answer, something out of the norm, and they get confused and can't finish the registration process. We get about 80 of them a day - apparently we're pretty popular for some reason.

What I can't get is in the last week I have had to physically delete almost 40 bogus accounts and I've changed the questions around on the registration process, which means someone is actually sitting behind the computer screen and actually doing the registration process themselves, from start to finish. Taking time out of their daily life to sit there and try and create a bogus account, which they would then presumably try to post some bit of spam about viagra, cheap drugs or penis enlargement. And the fun part about all that is that it WON'T MAKE IT THROUGH ANYHOW.

Why? .. well I'm not going to say, just suffice to say that we've invested a lot of time, effort and money in programs that keep it that way which I'm quite happy we have. The membership you see here isn't inflated numbers with bogus accounts (otherwise we would be in the multi-thousands) and I think to date we've done a good job with the spammers and bogus folks.

What I can't understand is why .. what in the hell makes someone think this is a good idea? Do they actually make money on these things? My wife seems to think so, otherwise why the heck would they do it? Viruses and worms if you follow the link? Possibly. I haven't a clue, curious about your ideas on that one myself.

Oh, and what is it with these e-mails where you get a jumble of garbage that seems to be just random words? Infected e-mails? Hidden messages between wetwork agents in the field? Alien messages which we're just not getting?

'jane plant stroked lovingly creation dog camera newspaper car flag of truth with bush computer miniature magazin which she held blinds dogfart conglomeration'.

See .. what the hell is that??

Alrighty, I'm off to combat the forces of spam again - non of which are making it through but I'm sure having a fun time (sarcasm) deleting these bogus accounts which someone is actually sitting down with a computer to create.

Oh, and I'm changing the damn question again you bastards ..

[Malebolgia]

I guess a loooooot of people in Afrika or perhaps somewhere in Azia get paid to do this stuff. You see a lot of forums with this kind of crap and it's only annoying. As if anyone actually is going to follow the links...It's as annoying as the crap you get in your mailbox.

But I think you're doing one heck of a job Nathan . I think I have spotted maybe two spammers in the two years I have been on this forum. One more reason why Wyrd rules.

[Maestro]

This was posted on a different forum:

Following a spate of unpleasant posts on the forum a few weeks ago, adminning new membership has been a nightmare of late. I don't know what triggered it off but the bombardment is endless. I absolutely shudder to think how really big forums cope.

While doing some background reading I came across this nifty little program that you can just go out and buy. Then you can annoy innocent people the world over. Rather than posting a link (in case it contains nasty stuff) here is a list of what this program can do:

Isn't that scary and doesn't it make you want to find out where they live and ... well you know :cry:

[supervike]

It has to be a money making operation. I figure that the 'spammers' get some sort of $ for every link clicker they can get. I also think sometimes they don't care so much as to not get a message through, but as long as thier name is in the list of members, they can possibly get a link clicker from that as well.

They are the scourge of the internet though, and the other site I help moderate (alpha forge games) doesn't have the software to knock them out, so I have manually blocked IP ranges, e-mails coming from certain domains, and user names. I think I finally got a handle on it, since now I only see about 1 a week. (it was 10 and more a day!)

[Duende]

which they would then presumably try to post some bit of spam about ...penis enlargement.

Are you really sure you want to block those? I mean, other than vincegaMer, the other "men" (using the term loosely) around here may need that pertinent information.

(yes, I'm in a "smacky" mood this morning! )

[Ritual]

'jane plant stroked lovingly creation dog camera newspaper car flag of truth with bush computer miniature magazin which she held blinds dogfart conglomeration'.

Ok, I'll do that immediately! Thanks for letting me know. And yes, my father is well. Thanks for asking.

[Wren]

Let me start by thanking you for all that effort, Nathan. It is great to be able to browse actual content on Wyrd forums and not have to sift through a lot of crap to do so.

I gotta think it's money, too. Hackers look for easy prey unless there's some sort of vendetta. Apparently spam and direct mail and all of that other annoying sort of stuff works on the idea that you make money even if only 1% of the audience falls for it. My theory on the gobbledygook mails is that a lot of servers are set up to look for certain key 'this is a spam' words in the title and body of a mail, so someone's made a program that takes random not those worse from the dictionary so it looks like a 'real' mail to the spam blocker software and hopes that a real person is puzzled enough to click something to find out what it's about.

I find the proliferation of businesses that prey on other businesses to be troubling also. Not that I think it's good to try to scam individuals, but a business has to have a physical shop, phone line and so on to conduct business, so it gets harder to block access. I worked as a receptionist in the mid-80's, and the office had a few toner scam calls and salesmen wandering in to try to sell knives or books or whatever to the employees, few enough that it was more of a novelty than a hassle. I worked a couple of years for a game store in the mall recently, and the amount and rudeness of businesses preying on businesses started to get to me. People who just wouldn't accept no and get off the phone when offering us free dentist trials or web page deals or whatever. As we'd been told we could be fired for ever buying anything it was just wasting everyone's time to keep on talking. Sometimes people even came in the store, including one kid who insisted on cleaning a stain on the carpet even after the manager told him we'd never buy anything (he had once and gotten in trouble). And all he accomplished was to make the stain much bigger and worse looking and make more work for the manager trying to clean up the mess! I don't so much blame that kid, he was clearly a guy with little money, few options and a crappy job, but I'm not very happy with the people coming up with the crappy jobs that are just adding more bother to all of our lives.

[lauth81]

The thing with the nonsense-emails is people trying to proliferate trojans and spyware. As Wren guessed, the nonsense wording tries to circumvent spamblockers who search for certain words or strings of words.

As for the spamposts in forums not submitted by bots, yes, there are people who get paid to do this. I don´t know the technical details, but they get paid for other people following their links.

[Xenon_Wulf]

I pretty much thought the nonsense mail was block-avoiding, but I have to hand it to them, the headers make for some VERY interesting ideas (I was planning on using a few during a larp for codewords or insane ramblings).

And Duende, I've never had a complaint in that department...

[Nathan Caroland]

Yeah I've heard about that program and others like it before and seriously, I think they should all bleed from their orifices for creating such a pain the ass. That being said, yup, I take into consideration these bots and the software and the measures involved here also do so as I'm always looking for ways to keep them out.

Generally BOTS can't answer questions though, even simple ones. What they do is fill in general forms which particular forums ask which is basically something the spammer just fills in on his end once and then sends the program out to do the work. Start putting in some different measures though and it balls them up good so that the spammer has to take the time to register himself, find out what the answers are, set it up so that his bots can bombard you, but by then I see one or two and change the answer around again anyhow. Generally they give up after that.

Basically, they suck. I would probably be surprised as hell how much money could be made on something like this but I for one don't ever care to really find out.

[EldinTux]

Can I also add my congrats to Nathan. I am battling 'returned' emails at the moment. Soemone has picked up on the fact that I have my own domain & are obviously trying to use it to spam others. What's annoying is that I don't think I can stop it. I only know that it's happening because a few days agao I received 20 'returned' emails to email addresses I have never used or even created, but use my domain name.

[goblyn13]

Can I also add my congrats to Nathan. I am battling 'returned' emails at the moment. Soemone has picked up on the fact that I have my own domain & are obviously trying to use it to spam others. What's annoying is that I don't think I can stop it. I only know that it's happening because a few days agao I received 20 'returned' emails to email addresses I have never used or even created, but use my domain name.

For something like that, Ask whoever is providing your domain to turn off the catchall, if you can't yourself. bout 10 years ago, a catchall was a nice idea in that it allowed you to create every e-mail address for your domain and not have to worry if it existed or not. (worked great if you had some marketing campaign you were trying to track or what not) however spammers learned that since you didn't reject any mail to your domain then it would be a great target. Then once they figured out that it all went ot one mailbox, they looked at as even better, lets have people get all irked at him for spamming and we'll just have it send mail as jonboy1254687 <at> somefreakindomain <dot> com and just plaster him with all the returned e-mails, we got through to 2% of them with our Nigerian 419 scam.

[EldinTux]

Mmm, it still doesn't stop them doing it - I can set up my system to reject these emails myself (or even do it on line with my ISP) but the recipients of the spam still believe it comes from my domain, & doesn't stop the spammer.

[Hinton]

I just wanted to toss in my thanks to you, FF, for everything you do; not only in keeping the forums "spam-free", but giving us this place to gather, running the contests, all of it.

:You_Rock_

[Flit]

I agree spammers suck.

The irony is that while I was reading this thread, my phone rang and I decided to answer it even though I didn't recognize the #. It was my cable company trying to sell me phone service!:ahhhhh: Auuuuggggg! I am even on all kinds of do-not-call lists, but they are allowed to call. I hate phone-spam as much as I do computer spam!

[Xenon_Wulf]

Well, on the bright side, there's this:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070531/ap_on_hi_te/spam_arrest

[Nathan Caroland]

whooohoooo!

And it looks like spam does pay .. the bastards.