September 14, 2014

It's Been Over a Month

...since we began requiring registration for comments. In the meantime a couple of people have reported issues commenting, so...
We're going to see if the spammers have given up on us.
Until further notice, comments are again open to everyone, regardless of registration status. 


"Oh YES! Mischief!"

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 07:10 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 51 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Despite the promise made by the picture caption, after more than 12 hours there is a distinct lack of mischief in this thread...

Posted by: Siergen at Mon Sep 15 11:37:06 2014 (r3+4f)

2

You said you wanted spam, so now you got it.

It's a mistake to think of spammers as one group-mind that can learn. It's more like a disease, operating mindlessly and taking advantage of any opening.

Over on Metafilter there's a pattern of people who join the site, make a couple of comments on existing threads and then make a spammy front page post. It happens again and again and the mods always spot it and delete the spam. You might wonder why "they don't learn" but the reason is that each new guy who does this isn't aware of any of the others, and thus can't learn from their mistakes.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wed Sep 17 09:23:40 2014 (+rSRq)

3 There's also the question of their incentive to learn. I mean... at the end of the day we're talking about spamming operations. There's no "reputable spammer". They're fly-by-night operations by design, because the moment you nail one of them down they get dropped on a million ban lists anyway. That said, what's their incentive to provide "effective" SEO rather than crappy SEO? It's easier to flail around, run some automated spam-attack scripts that generate a few pages you can point to, cash your check, and then go find the next sucker... and if it doesn't actually sell more handbags, what do they care?

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Wed Sep 17 17:07:21 2014 (zJsIy)

4 Wait..what? Was there spam while I was gone?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Sep 17 18:27:54 2014 (DnAJl)

5 I didn't see it either.  And I was trying to keep a sharp eye out for spam and other mischief.  Darn "acceptable use" policy for my work computer...

Posted by: Siergen at Wed Sep 17 19:50:30 2014 (r3+4f)

6 The same spammer also hit Pixy, and he seems to have done a full site-purge.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wed Sep 17 20:26:37 2014 (+rSRq)

7 They're Baaack.

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Sep 20 03:06:51 2014 (TJ7ih)

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