From mailspam to webspam?
A newsfactor story claims that more and more spammers are abandoning mail spam in favor of webspam, social networking and IM spam.
We were asking exactly this question at the EU Spam Symposium. Would a webspammer graduate to mail spamming? Would a former mail spammer shift his focus to web spamming?
My gut feeling was that it’s more likely a mail spammer will move on to web spamming than the other way around. I’ve so far been unable to show a concrete example of a webspammer becoming a mail spammer. I have seen plenty of examples of earlier reported spam from a guy I’ve identified as a web spammer, though. Often rather sophomoric mail spam, actually.
Why webspam is even an issue boggles my mind as it’s so easy to stop 99% of it with with a captcha, some filtering to block HTML and linkdrops, gone!
I made posting links and HTML something you earn over time, not for first time posters until it’s obvious they’re real members, as this defeats the purpose of spamming as they have to work to get to that level and losing it sets them back enormously.
Bill, you are only thinking about a very narrow form of webspam. Comment spam is what bloggers notice the most, but it is far from the only problem. Wiki spam, referrer spam, splogs, and general spamdexing are all major problems that cannot be solved by CAPTCHAs and filtering.
Joe, what value does the spam have if they can’t get links to their products or web sites?
I was getting abused on multiple fronts and via some simple scripting zapped most of it.
You will never ever stop everyone from posting garbage, but you can sure stop the automated tools dead in their tracks and make sure it’s humans doing the posts one at a time, which makes spamming a less attractive way of earning money when you remove the low hanging fruit on the tree since spam thrives on volumes of posts so some survive as the majority gets deleted.
And why won’t the same techniques I use to secure blogs, forums and forms secure a wiki?
Referrer spam is just STUPID and people that display those referrers get what they get.
Splogs, not much you can do about those if they aren’t under your control and I only worry about what I can deal with. Splogs are for the search engines to block, all the rest I can stop.
To IncrediBILL:
You’re displaying an enourmously nearsighted focus here. You and I can manage to keep spam out of our stuff. My blog and my wiki both use nofollow, and spam NEVER gets through on the blog, and gets cleaned up pretty quickly on the wiki. But that’s not the point. The point is all those thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands who don’t update their software, and don’t care. And all the ghosttown wikis, forums, blogs and guestbooks.
Webspam is a HUGE problem, and getting worse all the time.
What you’re talking about is the effect on YOU. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the effect on the web at large.
Yes, I understand my focus is narrow as I can only protect myself and preach the message to the masses. If the masses won’t listen, won’t upgrade, won’t install protection then the best we can hope for is the search engines filter them out with penalties until they do comply.
I understand the problem is huge, I know it effects the web at large, my point was it SHOULDN’T effect the web at large as the fixes are usually trivial for the most part.
Not sure what we can do except stop linking to those sites overrun with spam, complain to their webhosts and the search engines, other than that, what can you do except take care of your own backyard?
Not like we can login and fix the sites for them.
Then you have places like BLOGGER that allow people to create thousands of splog accounts, they’re owned by google, the sites have AdSense on them and nobody at Google has even seen fit to stop this automation, not even a captcha on account creation, it’s wide open.
How can you fight the rest of the web when the biggest company on the internet is dragging their feet when simple measures would stem the tide on their own sites?