Old forums need to be removed
I’ve said this before: Old forums will need to be removed. Even if there are no present links to it from your site, that doesn’t mean spammers won’t find it.
The point is: Old forum software was made before forum spamming became big business. It’s impossible to maintain an old forum that has been discovered by spammers. They will turn their bots on the forum and fill it with posts. To the tune of up to 100 a day!
And the spammers don’t just settle for links to their sites. I’ve seen posts where they insert javascript redirects in the posts, and in some cases even in the subjects of the posts - which means you’re redirected to the target site the moment your browser gets to that particular post. And some of those forums that aren’t pruned can weigh in at several megabytes in code alone.
Here’s an example from my comment spam today. It was a forum in Norway, and somehow I doubted the owners were spammers, so I checked it out. The owners of the forum had moved the site to a new domain name, but forgotten to remove the old forum…
And then I googled for the URL of that forum, and found loads of phpBB forums the spammers had filled with links to specific posts on that forum. The links didn’t work (syntax didn’t work), but that’s beside the point.
The point is that there’s an abundance of phpBB forum owners who don’t maintain their forums. Those forums should be SHUT DOWN, unless the owners are able to get the manpower to police the forums enough to remove each and every one of the spam posts!!!!
Can you help me identify a new type of referrer spam? About a month or so ago, my referrer logs got overwhelmed with message board/forum spam from about a half dozen sites; each one just floods my site with fake referrals from hundreds, possibly thousands of different “posts” from each of these sites. The offending domains include (please delete these in moderation of they are a problem):
civl.port.ac.uk
christmasmarketing.com
doingnothing.com
sinalumni.studentenweb.org
learn21.com
There are more, but those are the ones that repeat mercilessly. Endlessly. Each different referral source sends around ten fake referrals; each URL ends with “/messages/****.html”, the asterisks denoting a random 2-5 digit number.
When I look up “forum spam,” it seems more about spamming message boards, without mention of creating referrer spam. Are the two connected?
The two are connected. It’s a two step process. First comment spam old style forums, then spam (by any means deemed efficient) blogs to get the spam comments indexed by search engines, or create links TO the site with the spammy posts.