Forum spam

Forum spam is the creating of messages that are advertisements, abusive, or otherwise unwanted on Internet forums. It is generally done by automated spambots.

Types of spam

Most forum spam consists of links to external sites, with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive areas such as weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Some of these links contain code to track the spambot's identity if a sale goes through, when the spammer behind the spambot works on commission.

Spam posts may contain anything from a single link, to dozens of links. Text content is minimal, usually innocuous and unrelated to the forum's topic, or in a very old thread that is revived by the spammer solely for the purpose of spamming links. Some text is included to prevent the post being caught by automated spam filters that prevent posts which consist solely of external links from being submitted. Full banner advertisements have also been reported.^{[by whom?]}

Alternately, the spam links are posted in the user's signature, in which case the spambot will never post. The link sits quietly in the signature field, where it is more likely to be harvested by search engine spiders than discovered by forum administrators and moderators.

Recently^[when?], a very destructive forum spam attack has been propagated by inserting into comments redirect domains with an automated posting script like Xrumer. These domains redirect a user to pornographic Websites. If a user clicks on the image or attempts to close the Website an ActiveX codec will be downloaded as a Zlob Trojan^[1].

Effects of spam

Spam prevention and deletions measurably increase the workload of forum administrators and moderators. The amount of time and resources spent keeping a forum spam free contributes significantly to labour cost, and the skill required in the running of a public forum. Marginally profitable or smaller forums may be permanently closed by administrators. Forums that do not require registration are becoming rare.^{[citation needed]}

Spam prevention

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• Flood control: This forces users to wait for a short interval between making posts to the forum, thus preventing spambots from flooding the forum with repeated spam messages.^{[citation needed]}
• Registration control:
  • Some forums employ CAPTCHA (visual confirmation) routines on their registration pages to prevent spambots carrying out automated registrations. Simple CAPTCHA systems which display alphanumeric characters have proven vulnerable to optical character recognition software but those that scramble the characters appear to be far more effective.
  • Alternative is Textual Confirmation, where the user answers one or more random questions to prove he/she isn't a spambot.^{[citation needed]}
• Authoritative voice: Using an external filtering service, such as Akismet, to get a verdict if the data is spam or not.^{[citation needed]}
• Posting limits: Limit posting to registered users and/or require that the user pass a CAPTCHA test before posting.^{[citation needed]}
• Registration restrictions: Applying careful restrictions can seriously impact bogus and spambot registrations. One approach consists in the denial of registration from certain domain extensions that are a major source of spambots such .ru, .br, .biz, or freebase addresses such as "gawab.com". Another, more labor-intensive, consists in manual examination of new registrants. This examination looks at several indicators. First, spambots often delay email confirmation by several hours, while humans will confirm promptly. Second, spambots will tend to create user names that are unique, and unlikely to already be used in the forum, preferring "John84731" or "JohnbassKeepsie" to the much more common "John." Third, using a search engine to investigate, one finds hundreds, if not thousands of profiles using the spambot login name, sometimes with the diagnostic spam post, or "banned" label.^{[citation needed]}
• Changing technical details of the forum software to confuse bots - for example, changing "agreed=true" to "mode=agreed" in the registration page of phpBB.^{[citation needed]}
• Block posts or registrations that contain certain blacklisted words.^{[citation needed]}
• Be wary of IPs used by untrusted posters (anonymous posts or newly registered users). A useful technique for proactive detection of well-known spammer proxies is to query a search engine for this IP. It will show up on pages that specialize in the listing of proxies.^{[citation needed]}
• Some forums also have their own "spam subforums" to direct spam off their main site.^{[citation needed]}
• Some forums have the signature option disabled.^{[citation needed]}

References

1. ^ PHSDL - Project Honeypot Spam Domains List Zlob Trojan Forum Spam Documentation

See also

• Signal-to-noise ratio
• Forumwarz - online parody game that simulates forum spamming