Implied consent
A spammer once upon a time hit mainly forums. Maybe some forum owners subjected him to their wrath? So he decided to try some honey. Here’s the message he put at the top of his spams, lightly munged:
If you don’t need these messages at your guestbook, email us to abuse@mungedxxxxx.com.
Include your guestbook’s url and all your mirrors urls in the letter. Your website will be taken off our list in 48 hours.
His brand of spam is incest and beastiality, along with straight porn. So it should be common sense that most people wouldn’t want his “ads”.
I found some of his ads on a forum that had been long abandoned. Absolutely filled with porn and other spam. Including a redirect in the subject field of one of the spam posts.
Do me a favor. If you find a forum of that sort, send off an e-mail to someone in a position to remove the forum. The scripts are often Matt’s wwwboard or variants of it. That stuff should be banned! A forum for today is phpBB or Simple Machines (free ones), or Invision Power Board or vBulletin (paid ones).
June 16th, 2005 at 4:05 pm
We do the same for abandoned wikis (ghost towns). Halz especially goes out and hunts for these and posts notices, and if that doesn’t do any good looks for contact info. Sometimes it does no good, but often eventually it will get taken down or at least protected from further spamming.
But be prepared for nasty admins who think that solving the spam problem is not their job and your pushing them to take down the totally unused forum/wiki is against their freedom of speech. It needs to be done, just word it carefully.
We always link back to our EasySolutions page. Much of that is not relevant to forums, but can give some ideas.