Spam - We Are Asking For Your Help..

[Posting a link?]

Forum Guidelines
Posting a link? Read This!

Forgot your password? Need help?
Click Here To Contact Us

Mudflats Merchandise
AKMuckraker Amazon Store
Support AKM Merchandise

Download it here!

[Snoskred]

Spam on Internet Forums is posting many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. This may be done on one website, or across a number of websites.

The Mudflats Blog and the Forum Index Page now has a "Google Page Rank" of 4 - this will generally mean an increase in spammers arriving here posting links and trying to get a benefit from their links.

We need your help.

Forum Members can be extremely helpful in fighting spam on our forums. We'd like to ask you to keep an eye out, and if you see anything that looks like spam please report it - here is how to report a post - once you have reported it the moderation team will investigate.

We usually get back to you to let you know how things turned out when you report a post.

Please do not ever hesitate to report something - we would prefer to have a report and investigate it and it turns out to be nothing than nobody reports something suspicious and we don't spot it ourselves. We are very appreciative of your assistance in reporting posts. 

How do we deal with spam?

When we find a spammer, we delete the post as soon as possible. We also do a quick search on the internet to see if that person has placed similar messages on other forums and other locations on the internet. If the answer is yes, generally we will ban them right away. Usually the answer is yes, because usually these are spam bots.

On occasion we can spot them even before they post, and if we find they have placed spam elsewhere on the web, we will ban them before they get a chance to post their spam here.

Sometimes, a forum member who seemed reasonably sane will suddenly decide to promote something here in a spam-like manner. In that case we deal with it differently because we know the person is an actual person and not a spam bot. We will usually ask them to stop spamming. If they do not stop, they will be given a second warning, and if they still continue, they will be banned.

In order to help forum members spot and report spam, below we have given you a bit of information about spamming in the post below this one, and in the post below this will be actual examples of spam - not from these forums but from the other forums I run as those have been open a lot longer and have seen an awful lot of spammers.

[Snoskred]

There are several different kinds of spammers -

Those who think you need to hear the message they are posting.

These might sometimes be political messages, or advertising a website they own or someone they know owns, or advertising a competition. They post the same message several times on the forums, across different threads.

They might sometimes try to make it seem like the message is on topic for the thread they are posting in by changing what is said before or after, but the core message (the message they want to communicate to the world) is often copied and pasted across all the messages.

These may even be forum members who have seemed relatively sane previously but suddenly they have something they want to promote, and they will not hesitate to do so.

Those who are spamming in order to raise the "page rank" of the website they are promoting.

In general this kind of spamming will be done by spambots, but occasionally someone who has a website will sign up to a bunch of forums in order to get links back to their website.

If it is a bot, these bots will usually show up, put the link into their profile (and possibly their signature), post one post which contains the link they want to promote, and then vanish again.

If it is a person, they might act like they are a new user on the forums and post a hello post which might contain the link - also they will usually put the link into their signature straight away. They will also vanish after posting one (or several) posts in a short space of time.

Posting one message here might not seem like spamming - until you realise that the spammer involved has posted that same message across many message boards, guestbooks, comment areas of blogs, etc.

The search engines "rank" websites based on how many other sites link to that website. This creates a powerful motive for spammers to get links back to their website. That is why they do it.

Those who have something they want our forum members to do.

It might be voting for their website in a competition, taking part in a survey they are running, etc. They will post once with information about this, and then vanish.

There may be other kinds of spammers, also.

The above are the major three we will begin to see much more of here on the forums - especially once Google update their "page rank" and The Mudflats gets a page rank of our own.

[Snoskred]

I will now post some examples of spam which we have seen on the Aussie Bloggers Forum below. All of the URLs have been modified so they will not work. This is because we do not want to provide any benefit to the spammers.

It is safe to say anything involving the following is likely to be spam -

- free video or music
- money lending
- prescription drugs
- casinos
- porn

A few dead giveaways when it comes to spam -

- Bad English
- Lack of Capital Letters
- Posting it More Than Once in a Short Space of Time
- Posting it Somewhere It Doesn't Belong
- Text Does Not Extend Across Page (see example below)

if you want good royalty free songs and music
i can recommend you
http://`www.spamurlremoved /royalty-free-music.html
These tracks are completely exempt from rights of any
Performance Rights Organization.

The above is an example of text not extending across the page - see how the sentences are cut off mid stream? No normal person would write like that, you can tell it is a copy and paste.

please visit my new blog and give me any suggestions to improve my blog.

www.spamurlremoved.blogspot.com
www.spamurlremoved.blogspot.com
www.spamurlremoved.blogspot.com

The title of this message below was a classic - I am neighbour

I have built a forum like this. www.spamurlremoved.com
but how do I let people know it?
could you give me some advice?

Often you will see a simple link in a post, but the link goes to a website we would not normally want to link to from the forums. The following are some examples of what that might look like. Bear in mind the people who are writing these links are targeting specific keywords that they want to "rank" for on the search engines.

al0ooha! i'm a newbie here and hope to know more people from here.  :xgrin:

-----------------------------------------------------
Driver's Blog

el0w there..oh well me too have an account on twitter. it's a great social networking site i've ever used. once you've posted, someone will follow and i love it. I certainly recognized some unfamiliar sites by it..it's useful.  :xcool:

--------------------------------
of skylab and rickshaws

nice, with really interesting topic!  :xwink:

----------------------------------------------
European Car Industry

The above is some classic examples of spam, with bad english, numbers used as letters, posting three different links in a short space of time (less than an hour), lacking capital letters, and the final post - nice, with really interesting topic - is a hilariously bad post!

 http:// spamurlremoved.com ognbiwbj  <a href=\"http:   //spamurlremoved.com\">imvjvcul[/url]  wfyvoxdi http:   //spamurlremoved.com iconayyv jwgzepcl

This is obviously very odd spam, but another example of what it can look like. These were originally three different links, I have made it so that they cannot be clicked on.

A forum member felt the need to share this with us..

Hey if your a big fan of jazz and lounge music check this group out there great they have a new album out now im such a big fan of there's you can check them out for yourself let me know what you think???

http:// spamurlremoved / spamurlremoved

The post was agreed to be a bit too spammy for a first post, it was deleted and the user sent a PM.

Not surprisingly, he has been back to the forums only once, 8 days after posting the spammy post.

spamurlremoved.com - easy music sharing with ability to show emotions with help of smiles.

There are several ways of using this widget - http:// spamurlremoved .com/about.php

I use it to make right background for blog bost

The post was deleted.

[Sirenoftitan]

Just to remind everyone, spam also comes by snail mail. 

<snip>
Unbeknown to her, the scammers who sent that first scam letter had put her name on a suckers list and were selling her details to other criminals all over the world.

Jessica still refused to believe that her good news/excellent news mail was only worthless pieces of paper designed by criminals, to make her part with her cash.

As the weeks turned into months the amount of scam mail her Royal Mail postman was delivering was getting ridiculous. Around 30 letters a day, from all over the world that had things like Guaranteed Winner, Time Sensitive Document, Reply Immediately To Release Your Award and various other slogans and logos plastered all over them.

http://www.thinkjessica.com/?cat=5