inderocker

There have been quite a bit of new "members" striking up very odd topics around here lately. Their only intent is to spam our forums. This is from Wikipedia;

"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.

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, 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."

Please use the report button "" , which can be found on the bottom left of each post, It is completely anonymous.

Thanks!

VTRsurfer

Good tip indie,

I've always put up the "Spam" smilie when I've discovered a bogus post. But I didn't know about the alert icon. I will use it in the future

Also, I never open links or click on anything on a post if I don't recognize it as coming from a known and established member.

And I don't care if it's anonymous or not, I'll report these a-holes.