How to get moderator`s attention?

PRND[S]

PRND[S]

New member
I`ve reported two users and their activity to the moderators, both through the "Report" button and direct private messages. The "users" are in fact spambots that have hit this and thousands of other online forums, and both have left thousands of posts with embedded URLs on this site that are pushing counterfeit prescription drugs and steroids.

http://www.autopia.org/forums/groups/metalgolds.html

http://www.autopia.org/forums/groups/topia-sonata.html

No action has been taken. Am I in a quixotic battle to get this little corner of the Internet cleaned up?
 
`PRND[S said:
;2093149`]I`ve reported two users and their activity to the moderators, both through the "Report" button and direct private messages. The "users" are in fact spambots that have hit this and thousands of other online forums, and both have left thousands of posts with embedded URLs on this site that are pushing counterfeit prescription drugs and steroids.

http://www.autopia.org/forums/groups/metalgolds.html

http://www.autopia.org/forums/groups/topia-sonata.html

No action has been taken. Am I in a quixotic battle to get this little corner of the Internet cleaned up?
Click to expand...


Might be a problem for next couple of days.

Most are at Mobile Tech Expo
 
Thanks GearHead_1. I had PM`d Pats300zx who was online when I noticed what was going on. Can you nuke the groups and posts the two spambots created?

The way the spambots work is by creating posts with broken image tags. Rather than having a valid URL to the image, it`s just a URL to the online store that is selling the drugs. Anyone looking at the posts sees a small icon indicating an image that can`t be retrieved, but search engine crawlers see links to the stores. Hundreds of thousands of posts with keywords relevant to the drugs being sold and the embedded URLs scattered around online forums raise the store`s relevance in search results. It`s a technique used by SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies -- they spam any online forum with lax security to plant links to their client`s sites.
 
I understand the SPAMbots but in all honesty I don`t visit the Group section of the forum often. These "Members" have been terminated and the Group Discussions removed.
 
Most people don`t view the Groups section, and anything posted there doesn`t show up when you look for new posts or click on the Home link of the forum. That`s why the Groups feature is so popular with SEO spammers -- lax security (allowing brand-new members with no history to create new groups and post unmoderated) allows this stuff to go unnoticed. The forum software should probably be configured to not allow this, or remove the Groups altogether.

The only reason I even looked at the post from the newer of the two spambots was because no human would ever post something with the title "Title" and content "Message" or whatever it was (don`t remember now). I used to moderate two online forums, and a particularly insidious technique I often saw was that of spambots recycling older posts (either in part or in their entirety) of other members, so the posts would seem on-topic and make sense in the context of the forum. But if you spent enough time on the forum, you`d notice that the exact same question had been discussed before, or that a recycled post that had been copied only in part was missing crucial information.

Thanks for cleaning up that nonsense.
 
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