Forum profile spam
Here’s an example of forum profile spam in action:
play pool
The spammer registers user names in the beginning of the alphabet, populates the URL field with his spam, then leaves.
And of course even better for the spammer, the forum has been closed because they couldn’t moderate it effectively enough.
Another example from the same spammer:
macmerc.com.
Update: I noticed a referer from macmerc and rechecked the page I’d linked to. The profile is gone! Not only that, but the admin seems to have removed any other profiles left by the same spammer!
This is the same spammer that’s behind that whitebear nonsense that redirects to this site.
Forums and other sites that let people create profiles need to use captchas. Not only that, but making the profile pages and member pages unavailable to search engines might also help keep the spammers away.
April 15th, 2005 at 1:13 pm
Another way to combat this problem from a webmasters position is to alter the SQL statement that gets the user list for display on your site. Have it only list users with >0 posts. Then if you have a link that shows your newest member, then just show only the username with no link to their profile.
The idea here is that it will force the spammer to post and reveal an IP address before they get their links posted. Not a fix but perhaps a way to gain more info to combat this problem.
April 15th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
You have the IP address of the use anyway, it’s just a bit of work to match it up from the raw logs. And with many signups on the same day, it could get more complicated.
But don’t expect the IP address to be real anyway. It’s usually an open proxy, maybe half way around the world from the real location of the spammer.
April 17th, 2005 at 1:23 am
[…] my various forums as well as outrageous comment spam on my blog. The Spam Huntress has a post about this issue. Trish Wilson gave me some info about MT-Blacklist, but I have Word […]