Kitchen spammers????

[Big-Bird]

What gives with all the Kitchen Cabinet spammers. I have seen at least 6 in the last week....I like new kitchen cabinets as much as the next budding Master Chef but this is ridiculous!

[FalcoColumbarius]

I think they are actually targeting us for some reason, maybe they've heard about you. I've sent a request to the website contact asking politely if they could take us off their spamming list as we don't even use the same power structure as the UK so that rules out the appliances. It's not a spambot doing it, I believe it's a real person, so to speak. I also think they might be reading our forums as this recent campaign started just after "this thread" was created. Not certain, just a hunch.

Whether they respect and acquiesce to our polite request is another matter altogether. I guess I'm just hoping that there is an ounce of courtesy left in the world and that some of it might be found at the UK kitchen advertising department. One never knows... smiles.

Falco.

[Mr. Flibble]

They are doing it for SEO* ranking.

Basically, they post a link with the text to their site that they want, and the more Google sees "Kitchen Sale Gloucester" the higher that website ranks in searches for that term on google.

They probably got here from linking relative to the UK site, and since this website is close to the UK site (in internet terms) it becomes a prime target for spammers.

A partial solution is limiting new members to no signature or any HTML links before they have 5 posts. This way new members who spam can't join up and build these links in the first place.

* SEO - Search Engine Optimization

[Jordan]

Maybe we should all get new kitchens and see if it helps?

[FalcoColumbarius]

It's funny, you know... in a twisted and obnoxious way... We put up a question, usually a simple one but one that takes a human English speaking mind to understand. Sometimes we get complaints from people who don't get it, so we tried "What's the capital of Canada?", got spammed really badly. So looking for a quick temporary solution Mark suggested "who is the mayor of Toronto?" We had a good laugh because we knew that this information would have been world wide news at the time but we had to move on so we did it as a lark and with the idea that I would think of something better. In the meantime and to my surprise it worked and we didn't get get any spammers for a while so I thought that as it was working I would just leave it be. This was last year. Just recently I guess someone worked it out so I tried "who is the mayor of Vancouver?" which is the current question. I was going to to put the answer as "the straw man" as Robertson and his vision quest of banning cars and door knobs from Vancouver truly strikes me as a man looking for a brain. Alas, I figured that not all people registering with us would have the same experience as Vancouverites so I just used his name. This doesn't work so perhaps I'll go back to the MP& the Holy Grail type questions (you have to know these things when your administrator, you know).

Another Q I was thinking of would be Delica related but the problem is that not all Delica owners are necesarily Delica savvy (and I'm not referring to Space Gear owners, by the way!). On top of that ~ some of the spammers have Delicas. One of the kitchen spammers from Indonesia claims he has a Pajero Sport. I actually left a message for him that he could join but not advertise. I just deleted him again so I guess that is his answer. Once we had a spammer from Chennai, India whom upon deletion rejoined but didn't spam. Since that time we now have a few members from India that have Delicas, so perhaps it does work to a degree.

As it stands regarding the signature line. If you put a URL in the signature line it works as far as linking to the designated site but it is disconnected from Google. That is to say, if a DC member puts a link to his business website then if you click on it you get to that site, however, it will have no bearing on Search Engine Optimisation ranking. I like the idea of the "five date rule" before one gets a signature but I'm not keen on the idea of me having to monitor this situation. Mark and I did talk about this a year or so back but at that time there was no automatic recognition & investment options available and as we both do this for love and don't get paid, neither of us could afford the time it would take to monitor this option. I suppose we could have a review board of sorts for when a member requests a signature line but this still doesn't stop spammers from posting a link in the body of the post, like we have seen of late.

One good thing about them posting in the signature line is when I check their profile it works like a filter and shows up immediately so I don't have to dig deeper to see if they are spammers or not.

Falco.

[Mr. Flibble]

It's funny, you know... in a twisted and obnoxious way... We put up a question, usually a simple one but one that takes a human English speaking mind to understand. Sometimes we get complaints from people who don't get it, so we tried "What's the capital of Canada?", got spammed really badly. So looking for a quick temporary solution Mark suggested "who is the mayor of Toronto?" We had a good laugh because we knew that this information would have been world wide news at the time but we had to move on so we did it as a lark and with the idea that I would think of something better. In the meantime and to my surprise it worked and we didn't get get any spammers for a while so I thought that as it was working I would just leave it be. This was last year. Just recently I guess someone worked it out so I tried "who is the mayor of Vancouver?" which is the current question. I was going to to put the answer as "the straw man" as Robertson and his vision quest of banning cars and door knobs from Vancouver truly strikes me as a man looking for a brain. Alas, I figured that not all people registering with us would have the same experience as Vancouverites so I just used his name. This doesn't work so perhaps I'll go back to the MP& the Holy Grail type questions (you have to know these things when your administrator, you know).

Another Q I was thinking of would be Delica related but the problem is that not all Delica owners are necesarily Delica savvy (and I'm not referring to Space Gear owners, by the way!). On top of that ~ some of the spammers have Delicas. One of the kitchen spammers from Indonesia claims he has a Pajero Sport. I actually left a message for him that he could join but not advertise. I just deleted him again so I guess that is his answer. Once we had a spammer from Chennai, India whom upon deletion rejoined but didn't spam. Since that time we now have a few members from India that have Delicas, so perhaps it does work to a degree.

As it stands regarding the signature line. If you put a URL in the signature line it works as far as linking to the designated site but it is disconnected from Google. That is to say, if a DC member puts a link to his business website then if you click on it you get to that site, however, it will have no bearing on Search Engine Optimisation ranking. I like the idea of the "five date rule" before one gets a signature but I'm not keen on the idea of me having to monitor this situation. Mark and I did talk about this a year or so back but at that time there was no automatic recognition & investment options available and as we both do this for love and don't get paid, neither of us could afford the time it would take to monitor this option. I suppose we could have a review board of sorts for when a member requests a signature line but this still doesn't stop spammers from posting a link in the body of the post, like we have seen of late.

One good thing about them posting in the signature line is when I check their profile it works like a filter and shows up immediately so I don't have to dig deeper to see if they are spammers or not.

Falco.

These settings should be built-in to PHPBB, or available as plug-ins.

You should not have to monitor new registrations, rather, new registrations are not allowed to post links or have signatures until after X number of days.

I don't remember where these settings are now, as it has been years since I was a forum Sysadmin, but I am sure those functions are still available.

You always want this sort of thing to be dealt with automatically - the verification options won't work terribly well as humans now provide the verification methods and bots are the ones that post, thus your only real option is to limit new users and possibly have more moderators that can delete spam posts/users.

[Mr. Flibble]

If you can enable this type of mod (though I think it is a setting now) in PHPbb, you can greatly limit the number of people wanting to post kitchen spam:

https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2096637

The thing they care about most is posting links - this disables that function for new users.

[FalcoColumbarius]

Thanks Mister Flibble, I'll pass that onto Mark. I think a tool like this could be very useful.
I ended up changing the question to a Delica related one. Then I sent an e-mail to the guy from Indonesia, explaining that URLs on this site don't actually achieve SEO rankings. Let's see how this goes.

Falco.

[mark]

Thanks for this!

The proposed mod is a useful way to discourage "signature link" spam (the practice of increasing SEO backlinks through forum posts), but I'm not sure that it would reduce this particular type of "kitchen spam".

External links from Delica.ca (such as signature links, and links from posts) are already tagged with <"rel=nofollow">, meaning that Google and other search engines do not consider them as backlinks. Considering as well that our moderators are pretty efficient at disposing of these posts (typically within a few hours at most), the spammer isn't given much of an opportunity to boost SEO.

The kitchen spammer's message is likely intended to target human readers (rather than search engine bots), and almost for sure was created by an "AutoPoster" software (rather than by the spammer's own hand).

If so, the key to stopping this abuse isn't by restricting new member behaviour (which is what this particular mod does), but instead would be through blocking spammer accounts at the signup stage, and by continuing to manually report/delete any that slip through the cracks.


Mark

[FalcoColumbarius]

What is it with kitchen spam these days, anyhow? I remember when kitchen spam had real meat to it! None of this virtual crap! Back when they used real sodium nitrite, those were the days.... now a days... well... I guess we are just looking at things in a different aspic, eh?

Falco.