Companies Caught Spamming our Forum with Fake Posts

[mouser]

Maybe we need a thread keeping track of companies with a bad record of trying to spam our and other forums with FAKE posts that pretend to ask a question wondering about a program, and then have another user deliver an answer meant to convince people to buy/use the company's product.

Such behavior is extremely misleading and should call into question any positive review of the product.  It's highly deceitful and completely unacceptable, and is important to call out.

[mouser]

Magic-PDF was caught spamming here:
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=19162.0

[app103]

That's precisely why I have been giving any links being spammed here a bad rating and review on WOT.

Any site with a red mark and the comment reads "forum spammer" has been guilty of spamming dc.

http://www.mywot.com...user/148822/comments

Users of the WOT plugin for IE & Firefox will see the site ratings of any site they visit, and sites with an especially poor rating will even be blocked, if you have the settings configured to enable that.

I don't feel that leaving the offending spam on the forum just so we can link to it serves a good purpose. You'd be better off just making a list, supporting claims with screenshots if you feel the need, and getting rid of the spam.

[wraith808]

I don't feel that leaving the offending spam on the forum just so we can link to it serves a good purpose. You'd be better off just making a list, supporting claims with screenshots if you feel the need, and getting rid of the spam.

-app103 (July 14, 2009, 11:14 AM)

Agreed +1

[mouser]

ok we could do that with a screenshot, but let me ask.. what harm is there in leaving it on forum where people can find it via search etc., assuming the links to the site are all marked as nofollow anyway.

[Veign]

nofollow is no longer valid from Google.  This was changed a couple weeks ago.

[mouser]

wtf.. why not? is there no way to tell google and other search engines that you aren't supportive of a site just because you have a url to it??

how can a company like google build an entire system of reputation based on who links to who, and not provide a way for a site to link to another site and specify they aren't trying to give prestige to the site?

[Veign]

They removed the way nofollow worked with respect to link juice.  I should explain.  The cast a vote of approval remains the same but nofollow links now hurt the way link juice flows around a website.  This means that the nofollow links take away from the juice that would have flowed to good links.

This is why page rank sculpting has changed.  There's a new way to do it.

Sorry for the quick post without explanation.

(I would remove the links to spammers even if it has nofollow so it doesn't hurt DC's website)

[app103]

nofollow is no longer valid from Google.  This was changed a couple weeks ago.

-Veign (July 14, 2009, 02:56 PM)

The only news I heard about nofollow was related to internal page rank sculpting for SEO purposes and not related to whether or not you vouch for external link targets.

From my understanding, Google still considers nofollow valid and is still encouraging its use for any links pointing to a target you will not stake the reputation of your site on, especially ones contained within user generated content and ads, preventing any of your page rank from flowing to those sites. It does not hurt you to use them on links with external targets.

What they changed is how much page rank flows to the links not containing that attribute.

Before if you had 3 links on a page, pointing to pages within your own site (an about page and 2 content pages) you could concentrate page rank that flowed to those 2 content pages and boost it by throwing nofollow on the link to the about page. That way the remaining 2 links would each get 50% of the available google juice.

Now, with the change, instead of dividing the PR juice between the links without the nofollow attribute, you get the same amount flowing to those 2 pages, even if the 3rd has nofollow.

So instead of boosting the page rank of pages on your own site by pushing 50/50, you still get only 33% going to each, with the exception of the one that has nofollow. That one would still get nothing.

Nothing was changed with regards to how much of your page rank would go to any link with the nofollow attribute. They still get nothing.

http://searchenginewatch.com/3634387

http://www.mattcutts.../pagerank-sculpting/

[Rhutobello]

An idea might be to make a forum called "Spam & Inappropriate post",and move them there, as a warning to what might happen to those who don't follow postings rules.

[Carol Haynes]

I think that isn't a bad idea just move all threads relating to spam to a locked forum and remove all links to the spamming website. Also change the thread title to include [Spamming Bastard - avoid buying .... and warn others] prefix.

[app103]

I think that isn't a bad idea just move all threads relating to spam to a locked forum and remove all links to the spamming website. Also change the thread title to include [Spamming Bastard - avoid buying .... and warn others] prefix.

-Carol Haynes (July 18, 2009, 08:25 AM)

Did you know that gri used to do that on his forum? He even had them sorted into child boards, by type of spam. One section for adult content, one for malware, one for pharmaceuticals, etc. 

It was also the reason for quite a few of his hosting accounts being suspended. (of course he never removed the links from posts, either)

I am not sure it's a good idea, even if you remove the links. Plus it's a lot more work to ban the user, move the post, and then edit it, than to just ban & remove posts.

Plus you'd have to have a way to keep those posts out of the normal site feeds, because normal people are not going to want to read spam, even with the links removed. If you can't keep it out of the regular forum feeds, then it's just a lot of unnecessary, annoying, noisy clutter that diminishes the enjoyment of all that use the feeds, and will cause people to unsubscribe.

[mouser]

ok you've convinced me, we will delete the threads but keep them somewhere so we can provide them as evidence if need be.

[f0dder]

ok you've convinced me, we will delete the threads but keep them somewhere so we can provide them as evidence if need be.

-mouser (July 19, 2009, 01:51 AM)

An admin/mod-only "halls of the dead" subforum? Works pretty well at the asmcommunity

[mouser]

That's basically what deleting them does.. they get moved to a "Deleted" board that is admin only.

[jgpaiva]

I think I understand what Veign means (and app explained). Having links with nofollow will actually hurt DC, when compared to the previous scheme.

I think the best solution would be for the "deleted" board to be open for members (but not for the google bot), and any post that gets in there gets its urls removed.

On the other hand..
1 - No one really will read that board, so it'll be sitting there for nothing
2 - Without the spam links, sometimes you can't even understand where the post links. (and fixing this is really just more work for admin, without a real advantage).
3 - Several of the spam links are not in the posts themselves, but in the signatures of the users, which have to be removed.