We have a growing spam problem (and thank you to spam reporters!)

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emk
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We have a growing spam problem (and thank you to spam reporters!)

Postby emk » Thu Dec 31, 2015 6:38 pm

We had another drive-by spam run this morning (which has been cleaned up). Thank you to everybody who reported it.

These spammers can usually be identified by some combination of the following features:

  1. A new user only posts to praise a specific language school or commercial product.
  2. A new user makes several lightweight "Great post!" comments until they get past the 4-message threshold, and then finally slip in a link to an online English composition class, or whatever.
  3. Somebody signs up just to post a link to their useless, overpriced language product. We have some self promotion guidelines which say that you can mention your own products only if (a) you're an established member of the forum or (b) you ask the moderators for permission. There's also (c), your product is genuinely worthwhile and interesting in the opinion of the moderators and forum members, but that's a purely subjective judgement. If you see a post advertising a worthless knockoff phone app or an awful language course, please feel free to report it as spam.
In general, we do not wish spammers to trash our forum by filling it with deceptive ads for lousy products. If they want to advertise that stuff, they can pay for their own sites.

If you see any spam in the future, please feel free to use the "!" / "Report" button to let us know about it. We now have a "Ban Hammer" extension just for spammers, which allows us to clean up their mess in just a couple of clicks. Thank you for your help!
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tomgosse
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Re: We have a growing spam problem (and thank you to spam reporters!)

Postby tomgosse » Thu Dec 31, 2015 11:55 pm

no-more-spam.jpg
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sjintje
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Re: We have a growing spam problem (and thank you to spam reporters!)

Postby sjintje » Fri Jan 15, 2016 7:18 pm

emk wrote:... a link to their useless, overpriced language product.


Maybe we should have a spam subforum where you could transfer them all too, so they can see what will happen to them if they post here (if they are paying attention) and otherwise we will know who and what to avoid and/or be able to mock them mercilessly.
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tomgosse
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Re: We have a growing spam problem (and thank you to spam reporters!)

Postby tomgosse » Fri Jan 15, 2016 7:34 pm

sjintje wrote:
emk wrote:... a link to their useless, overpriced language product.


Maybe we should have a spam subforum where you could transfer them all too, so they can see what will happen to them if they post here (if they are paying attention) and otherwise we will know who and what to avoid and/or be able to mock them mercilessly.

I would rather just report it and have the mods delete it. From what I've read spammers and telemarketers really want to get your attention. Once they have that "foot in the door" they can keep working on you. If their email, post, or phone call goes to the same place as your missing socks they have no idea that you even exist. And that's the way I like it. :lol:
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Re: We have a growing spam problem (and thank you to spam reporters!)

Postby Serpent » Fri Jan 15, 2016 7:41 pm

Yeah, and as emk pointed out elsewhere, google penalizes forums that don't take out the trash. ie if it detects spammy and/or malicious links, our rating suffers.
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