Hard to spot forum spam
I got a post to a forum I own. It was apparently from a student trying to decide on a college or online college.
He’s underlined all the words, making it hard to spot the links he’d hidden under the words. The only way to spot them was to run your mouse pointer along the lines and see the color of the links changing, or the pointer turning into a hand.
Just a heads up.
October 11th, 2006 at 7:12 am
Heh that’s actually a good idea. Nice one.
October 11th, 2006 at 7:24 am
I thought you were out of Blackhat, Esrun?
And there’s a pretty simple way to fix it, if you’ve got a forum that’s susceptible: Change the color of a link so it stands out even when you don’t hover over it.
October 11th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Indeed Ann, no more BH for me. Although I might still talk about BH stuff, I don’t intend to carry out any such activities.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:21 pm
Yeah, that’s an excellent argument against setting the link colour the same as the regular text colour. Mind you, if you allow them to change the font colour, you’re back where you started.
October 12th, 2006 at 1:45 am
Heck, his site is a PR 0 so he’s not wearing any hat, black, white, or otherwise as you need PR to wear a hat
October 12th, 2006 at 2:56 am
LMAO Bill, that comment was even funnier than the rubbish you throw out on your blog. You think I need PR for my blog? Do you know how much that domain has been abused?
You bringing up pageWank as an argument is just pathetic… Do you really think a blog about spam is going to have a great PR? I don’t need a number on a toolbar to know my site is popular
October 12th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Dude, it was a JOKE but since I’ve obviously struck a nerve, I’m not the one claiming to be an SEO! An SEO without PR is kinda like a web designer without a website.
A blog about spam has a HUGE PR as Spamhuntress is a PR 7
October 13th, 2006 at 7:58 am
So if you go out and spam thousands of forums and that gives you thousands of domains with Pr5-7 does that make the website worth visiting? Trust me, it doesnt
October 13th, 2006 at 9:29 am
I wouldn’t know, I don’t spam, you tell me.
October 13th, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Bill, I don’t spam
Keep an eye on my site though because I’m going to be releasing something interesting soon 
October 13th, 2006 at 8:38 pm
I didn’t say you spammed, I just asked you to tell me
Programming something new?
October 14th, 2006 at 5:37 am
Yeah Bill, I can’t really give any details right now… don’t want to spoil the suprise.
October 15th, 2006 at 7:20 am
A variation of this strategy is to use blanks as anchor text for linking to doorway pages, but of course this only works as long as the links aren’t underlined on mouse over. By disabling CSS in one’s browser the mess becomes immediately visible again (just in case some board admin hasn’t discovered this magic yet).
October 16th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Sigh, looks like the BH is back in business…
October 27th, 2006 at 3:22 am
Um, spoil the surprise?
I was expecting a new script or something and you went offline
Sigh.