Author Topic: Leech Attacks (Read 23,439 times)

arunpawar · « **on:** October 15, 2007, 09:26 AM »

I've been reading weblogs for quite some time.I've seen so many tech guys getting frustrated by the response of the readers they get on their weblogs.Most of programmers with tech blogs posts howtos and other article stuff,which is very good thing for building internet.They are constantly being hit by Leechers.So you'll ask me what are leechers?

leechers are guys/gals out there hunting for the answers for their questions.They'll ask tech guys for the answers these ways:
1. "Hey send me the fibbonaci sequence program".
2. "Hey send me any good book on linux on my email address"
3." Send me link to download for the warez"
Some people try and act like begging:
1."Hey please help me send me the answer to these programming problems in C"
2."Hey please help i m in trouble i need xxx/yyy software ?"
3."Hey i'm student and i can't do the programs in C please help me out do this homework".

Sometimes they sound like ordering or rude while making commetns.
1" Hey,send me link to warez software site?
2. "Hey send me some library automation program in java,fast,NOW".

Sometimes they do invest time in you,make friendship just to get their purpose out of it.It's really hard nowadays to differentiate between leeches and good guys.Asking for some tutorial and howto can be good idea usually to ask for help but asking for readymade programs that does the homework is lame.Sometimes they don't even appreciate you if they get help from you.If they are not maintaing any sort of readership with you then whats the point in having the readers or visitors to your site.

My observation on weblogs for filtering leeches:
There are some tech guys like kirupa chimathambi from kirupa.com who sorted out this problem by placing moderator on his site for filtering out such leech.Paul stamatiou from pstam.com filters out such comments instantly.On the other hand our member "Mahesh2k" unable to filter out leech comments on his site onecore.net His site is being attacked evryday with leech request of more than 120+ leech comments.One of my friend who works for d2design derivative have same problems as some customers call for the design ideas and waste valuable buisness time.Trap17 free hosting site kicked out many users from their forum for such leech behaviour.

Everyone have their own life & need to maintain balance but asking for custom content or program that gets the time of programmers.Which is more valuable than any such leechers lifetime.Asking for help when you get stuck is good thing but leeching & not appreciating for help is really bad thing.There are ways to ask for help and get your answers but if you're only interested in your job getting done.You get many people arround you,asking for free-advice or content from when you start asking for the charge they all disappears.

How you'll handle such leeches in real life or on your tech blog?

Renegade · « **Reply #1 on:** October 15, 2007, 02:38 PM »

The losers are generally easy to pick out.

They can't type proper English to save their lives.
They ask obvious questions.
They ask extremely general questions.
They didn't read the article.
They ask for completed solutions.

I email them something useful if they work at it. I don't give candy coated solutions. I don't have time for that.

e.g. In this thread the guy wanted everything. It's a common enough request that I did a show for it (basically). That way I get to recycle my efforts and not have one person be ungrateful for doing a ton of work, which is often the case.

Ralf Maximus · « **Reply #2 on:** October 15, 2007, 02:50 PM »

A big clue is oftentimes the subject line itself. A carefully worded subject ("How do I use Windows BitBlt to create a mask?") means I'll take a look, whereas a poorly worded one ("HELP!") gets ignored.

One of my favorite articles:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

tinjaw · « **Reply #3 on:** October 15, 2007, 03:43 PM »

I like the term that Amy Hoy came up with, Help Vampires.

Slash7 with Amy Hoy - Help Vampires: A Spotter's Guide
[attach=#1]

mahesh2k · « **Reply #4 on:** October 15, 2007, 05:07 PM »

Hey bro renegade.It's not that easy man i've tried all my strngth by creating some guided help for such leechers.Again it is hard to point them from their spelling mistakes it is not manadtory for non english users to be fall in that categary.

What i've learned from my experiencce is these guys:

1.want quick solutions for their college or school work
2.or custom project for their needs for free
3.want to invest time on them for free

@renegade:you helped one guy but he's not appreciating at the end.

here is what i recieved last week on onecore.net

Quote

GUYS COULD YOU PLEASE HELP ME MAKE THIS PROGRAMS, IM NOT FOND OF DOING THIS COZ IM JUST A TRANSFER STUDENT AND I GOT LATE FROM THEIR LESSONS. PLEASE HELP ME, THE SUBMISSION IS GETTING NEAR…

IT IS A TURBO C PROGRAM, KINDLY AND PLEASE IM PLEASING YOU TO SEND THE FILES TO ME INCLUDING THE .C, .BAK AND THE EXE FILE PLEASE…..

reyesleoc@yahoo.com
borlogs_1416@yahoo.com

PLEASE SEND IT TO MY E-MAIL

IL BE EXPECTING FOR YOUR QUICK RESPONSE…
THANKS GUYS!!!

? Make a program that converts peso to dollar or dollar to peso, depending on the user desire. The user is asked which conversation he or she wants performed. If the desired conversation is peso to dollar, then the program reads in an amount in peso as well as the peso-to-dollar exchange rate. The program then outputs the equivalent amount in dollar and cents. If the user instead requests a conversation from dollars to peso, the roles of dollars and peso are interchanged.

? Make a program that will encode number from 1 to 20 and display the squared of the number from 1 upto the encoded number.
Example :
Enter a number [1-20]: 7
1 1
2 4
3 9
4 16
5 25
6 36
7 49

? Workers at a particular company have won a 7.6% pay increase. Moreover, the increase is retroactive for six months. Write a program that takes an employee’s previous annual salary as input and then outputs the amount of retroactive pay due the employee, the new annual salary, and the new monthly salary.

? Make a graph that will display the Philippine Flag with just a simple circle in the middle of the triangle as a sun…

lOOK at that its way hard to handle such leeches this guy sent comment on almost 7 articles realted to c++ programming.

I really freaked out

dealing with such people in real life as well as online.I'm really seeking for psychatrist or something for dealing with such people

Thanks arun for posting this maybe i can learn fromm opinions.

tinjaw · « **Reply #5 on:** October 15, 2007, 05:29 PM »

In general, if I was responsible for a forum, and one in which it was important for me to spend the time, I would dedicate a some time each day to gardening. For example, that posting from onecore.net that mahesh2k posted, I would delete the body of the post and replace it with a link to a specific paragraph in a policy document (or FAQ) that states why the post was removed. Eventually trusted moderators can take over. I would also add [Editor's Note:] to postings with links to relevant guidance. For example, something like, "When including source code in your posting use the [code][/code] tags for better formatting." and include a link to a how-to document showing a beginner, intermediate, and advanced examples of using the [code] tag.

I think that the number one reason discussion groups, of any form, are useful, is because they provide a filtered/vetted/focused discussion of the topic. Anything that worsens the signal to noise ratio will eventually kill the discussion group.[/code]

Ralf Maximus · « **Reply #6 on:** October 15, 2007, 05:33 PM »

It occurs to me this will always be a losing battle. These people are not the sort to read posting guidelines, even if the guidelines are thrown in their face as Tinjaw suggests. The "gardening" is absolutely necessary but only to prevent aggrivation to legitimate users.

A "containment strategy" if you will...

Renegade · « **Reply #7 on:** October 16, 2007, 08:19 AM »

@mahesh2k - You've just proved what I meant in the quote you had. The guy uses all caps with stuff like 'COZ'. That's what I mean by they can't type to save their life. It's relatively easy to pick out the non-English speakers. In that case it's forgiven, but not the laziness.

mahesh2k · « **Reply #8 on:** October 20, 2007, 08:22 AM »

oh u got me on that renegade.Actually i made mistake on website by helping some of the readers in their programs.That was the mistake all these comments are result of that help i did few months ago.the guys i helped spread some word about the site and somehow misunderstood that i help others this way.

Hmm i dont know the solution to this problem.

app103 · « **Reply #9 on:** October 23, 2007, 05:00 PM »

Quote from: mahesh2k on October 20, 2007, 08:22 AM

oh u got me on that renegade.Actually i made mistake on website by helping some of the readers in their programs.That was the mistake all these comments are result of that help i did few months ago.the guys i helped spread some word about the site and somehow misunderstood that i help others this way.

Hmm i dont know the solution to this problem.

Would you like to send them to my chatroom?

if your answer is yes...

irc.rizon.net #coderzinc

mrainey · « **Reply #10 on:** October 23, 2007, 06:04 PM »

I got this one a while back.

"Hello Sir,
My name is Dhanasekar, I am doing my B.E Manufacturing Engineering in College of Engineering,Chennai,India. Sir currently i am developing a software, "cost estimation Intergrated with knowledge" Which is mainly used to estimated the manufacturing cost and I am doing this as a part of my curriculum project work (NOT FOR ANY COMMERICAL PURPOSE). I download your ME Consultant Pro software sir, it is really a amazing software for cost estimation.I feel this software will be my model from which i can develope more.So i need some valuable help from you sir. GIve some inital source code you employed to develope this software or the database you used for this software.
Again I want to make sure that i am asking only for educational purpose. I promise you i wont distribute your valuable contributions to anybody. If u want i will send u my College Id.please help me to develope a new valuable software sir.

Regards,
Dhanasekar"

Renegade · « **Reply #11 on:** October 23, 2007, 09:51 PM »

@mrainey

Wow!

That's just craziness!

mwb1100 · « **Reply #12 on:** October 25, 2007, 06:41 PM »

Something I've wondered about before which may not really be related to leeches, but I'll ask anyway...

I often come across single message postings in forums by user IDs that never post again that go something like:

Quote

Hi, I just found forum. Its really nice, I'll be vistiing often.

They seem like some sort of spam, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the purpose of those messages are since they aren't asking for anything or pointing to some other site. Is there something going on that I'm not seeing, or is it simply that people legitimately like to drop a 'hello' into a forum then go into lurk mode? There would be absolutely nothing wrong with that, it just seems strange to me (which may well be a cultural thing).

The other thing that makes me curious about these postings is that they often mention how nice the forum *software* is (as opposed to the discussions going on in the forum), and they usually don't mention anything specifically related to the forum they like so much.

mouser · « **Reply #13 on:** October 25, 2007, 06:54 PM »

Isn't it possible that it's someone who likes the site and the discussion but isn't very talkative or doesn't feel like they have much to contribute to discussions, but still loves reading other people posts, and just wanted to give you a thanks?

Lashiec · « **Reply #14 on:** October 25, 2007, 08:05 PM »

That's spam, I've come across that kind of messages hundreds of times on the Internet, in unprotected wikis and blog comments, often accompanied by their pals, spam links (yuck!).

It could be what mouser says, but 99% of the time it will be spam. It could be that moderators or site owners found about the spam, and simply removed the links. On really big forums, administrators can't be everywhere, and the only thing moderators can do is close the thread or clean up the posts.

Ralf Maximus · « **Reply #15 on:** October 25, 2007, 08:37 PM »

Quote from: mouser on October 25, 2007, 06:54 PM

Isn't it possible that it's someone who likes the site and the discussion but isn't very talkative or doesn't feel like they have much to contribute to discussions, but still loves reading other people posts, and just wanted to give you a thanks?

Just curious: Is there any mechanism within SMF for detecting lurkers? Like statistics for their account showing how many pages read even if they never post, that sort of thing? I assume there's a cookie or something that shows them as "logged in" -- otherwise they'd be tracked as anonymous visitors, maybe IP address only... right?

If that's the case then it'd be possible to separate the friendly lurkers from the one-time spam posts.

mahesh2k · « **Reply #16 on:** October 27, 2007, 09:49 AM »

Quote

Would you like to send them to my chatroom?

Oh you think you can handle them? Ok i'll add the address of your chatroom on the site so i can redirect them to u.You can help them but most of the users ask for C++ so if u are comfortable let me know.abt that.

Mouser,its diffrent the way i ask questions and these guys ask.These guys don't need your presence once their problem is solved.

Lashiec · « **Reply #17 on:** October 27, 2007, 02:15 PM »

app, POST the logs after the bloodfest

Darwin · « **Reply #18 on:** October 27, 2007, 02:50 PM »

Unbelievable. I am often ticked off by the kinds of posts that you are describing here. As an end-user I find them frustrating and amazing for their authors' rudeness, presumption, and sense of entitlement. Mike - I wish I had a pair as big as your correspondent's!

app103 · « **Reply #19 on:** October 27, 2007, 08:54 PM »

Quote from: mahesh2k on October 27, 2007, 09:49 AM

Oh you think you can handle them? Ok i'll add the address of your chatroom on the site so i can redirect them to u.You can help them but most of the users ask for C++ so if u are comfortable let me know.abt that.

We have been handling their kind for years.

Some go away without what they came for, but they leave with a better understanding of why they aren't getting what they want and why nobody can or will just hand them instant knowledge.

Some understand and will work for their knowledge...and keep coming back for more help. Once they learn how to learn, they usually do ok for themselves.

Some go on to become helping hands in the channel, providing info & help to others, sharing what they have learned.

We can provide help for a lot of programming languages in English, and in both Italian & English for C/C++ & Linux help. We also help with just about anything computer related...and things not computer related.

And anybody in my channel that does (or offers to do) someone else's work for them will receive a stern warning from me along with an explanation of why they shouldn't. Doing things for them instead of helping them do it themselves violates the help rules.

Quote from: Lashiec on October 27, 2007, 02:15 PM

app, POST the logs after the bloodfest

There has never been a bloodfest, but there has been an immense amount of comedy over the years.

Quote

Example:
<¨°ºO Blutig O> who knows perl?
<¨°ºO Blutig O> I mean who knows Kernel
<¨°ºO Blutig O> I mean who knows Pascal?
<app> what do you need to know?
<¨°ºO Blutig O> can you advise me a good pascal tutorial
<¨°ºO Blutig O> I wanna learn it
<¨°ºO Blutig O> ru still alive?
<app> http://delphi.about.com
<¨°ºO Blutig O> it's not ok
<¨°ºO Blutig O> I wanna know it without learning

arunpawar · « **Reply #20 on:** November 05, 2007, 10:21 AM »

@ Mahesh2k My suggestion to you is :
1.Stop showing your entire site in India this will keep lot of leechers in our country from sending you such comments.
2.They are not in you advantage in anyway.You'll not generate any sort of revenue if you even keep donationware programs as all your visitors from india are using you.
3.Use google analytics to see if the visitors from indiaare in your site for how much time?How many of them are care to reply?Your wordpress akismet tells you how much you are hurt with such comment than spam.right
4.We both are from india but we are not using any tehie for our purpose or putting content on the net for such leechers,we do it for newuser or beginner so that they don't get any problem,one good way to get away from them is to warn them about this.We techies are more valuable then these leeches.Dont take them lightly.