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New type of spam bot (was Wow.....)

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New type of spam bot (was Wow.....)

Postby Lydiot » Wed Jun 21, 2017 5:40 pm

The preceding post was removed. It consisted of a quote built of paragraphs from more than one post and had a completely off topic reply. Also see wkitty42's reply below.

Why on earth is a newbie bumping this thread? Smells like bad trolling...
Last edited by Johan G on Wed Jun 21, 2017 10:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: The preceding post was removed...
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Re: Wow.....

Postby wkitty42 » Wed Jun 21, 2017 7:19 pm

more likely a spambot trying to stealth its way in and appear legitimate... i've seen them come back some time later after the topic has moved down the line a bit and change their post to include their spam... at that point, the search engines pick it up and they have backlinks... this is one reason why topics should be locked after a period of inactivity... even then it takes someone to go back and reread whole active topics to find these sneaky buggars and report them so they and their trash can be deleted...

in fact, look at the link in the second paragraph of the quote... that wasn't there in hooray's original post ;)

post and poster reported...
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Wow.....

Postby bugman » Thu Jun 22, 2017 1:02 pm

Yes, we have a new type of spambot plaguing the wiki, using the tactic of responding to posts with nonsense scraped from earlier posts or unrelated junk. They used to just start new threads, or have links to websites in their profile (really dumb as search engines cannot access that link), but now this bot type is responding to threads. Their first few posts have no links, which makes it difficult for moderators to judge, but then next ones have the spam links semi-hidden in the message. Please keep an eye out for them. Johan and I have permanently banned a bunch of them lately! The pattern is now becoming clearer.

Cheers,
Edward

P. S. I'll spin this out into a new thread to keep the original clean.
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Re: New type of spam bot (was Wow.....)

Postby bugman » Thu Jun 29, 2017 3:01 pm

@FlugHund: Thanks for the catch of koiseptember being a bot. This eliminated bot posted 3 messages on pre-existing threads, using direct copying of earlier posts in that thread, and had not gotten to posting the spam links yet. Cheers!

Edward

P. S. The bot was IP blocked. If someone does detect such a bot, please include a link to the copied post in the report. That helps the mods quickly evaluate and eliminate these nasty automated things.
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Re: New type of spam bot (was Wow.....)

Postby FlugHund » Thu Jun 29, 2017 7:16 pm

Roger. Wilco!
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