101 Articles Automated Forum Posts
AUTOMATED FORUM POSTS
Where do these forums actually get their content to spam?
Yahoo Answers and other famous portals where people meet often provide the huge feed for this software. Everything your forum needs is already in here neatly categorized. They have thousands of new and diverse questions being asked and the same answered by the immense user base which fundamentally serves as your topics and answers. Hence the automated forum posting scripts and utilities use such portals to generate instant keyword enriched new topics and replies make it seem like your forum is highly active with significant topics.
How is it beneficial to the spammer?
In a webmasters world, where they are aware external links are the king in ranking a keyword and when the competition becomes too high, some follow these negative methods to give a temporary boost to their sites. Even at the risk that when found out by Google, it will get a penalty, and the site may take a very long time to recover, some websites still follow such methods. The person who is paid to promote a keyword related to payday loans, insurance policies, pills, casinos becomes a member of already popular forum sites to post hyperlinks. An ignorant user who sees such links available in a trusted source, clicks on the link and is redirected to their websites adversely gaining traffic to their sites. Commonly the posts are embedded with links from spammers to gain back link value to their site.
All a forum spammer does is edit their profile which is most likely to be a fake identity and post comments or threads which provides a link to their websites. Their IP addresses cannot be tracked also as they hide behind dynamic IP address which keeps altering due to use of proxy servers.
Spammer basically uses the post in thread as an advertisement for his website. Even most popular forum industries like Phpbb, Joomla are struggling hard to provide their customers a good platform which is completely free from hackers. Sources say that people from gambling, medicine and adult sites mostly involve in such spamming. |
Why do spammers involve in such activities?
Spammers regularly participate in forum spamming to
Increase the incoming traffic to their websites
Influence the search engines for increasing the rank of their websites and earn loads of illegal profits.
Loopholes
People who do this automated Forum Posts technique will have a group of people working with them to hack the well versed forum site by writing code which can easily break the security measures the forum sites have taken. They also make use of the automated tools and special software's to do the same. By posting the forum's URL address, the software he uses employs bots to creep through these forums and paste posts on topics of discussions.
Security Measures
Search engine organizations are pretty aware of the situation and they are taking every step to not only combat these hackers and spammers but also to come up with more comprehensive algorithms that decides the fate of a website online.
Temporary Back Link power
Through this spamming, the link will be there in the popularized forum sites which give temporarily backlink power to the site they wish to bring up. When they place their URL on a popularized forum site the number of Clicks to the URL may get higher which may also result in boosting up the power of the URL.
The power of the URL will be lost only when the URL has been removed from those sites.
How to identify spammer accounts?
Mostly spammer accounts in Forum will be identified from the URL's which often contain a numeric ID that represents the thread, while the remainder of the URL can in reality be any string:
E.g.:/Unclean URL example: http://example.com/forum/index.php?t=rview&th=120029
Clean URL example: http://example.com/forum/12345/lets-use-friendly-urls
Profile Creation
Profile creation is mandatory for every user to be a part of the forum by which he/she can gather details as well as post their comments or thoughts.As mentioned earlier, spammers need not create a profile for themselves to log in, instead they make use of automated tools and software's to employs bots to creep through the system, break the security walls and creates postings.
Every post has an identity in form of username along with certain details about the user who posts that respective comment. Though the whole process employed by a spammer is automated, the bots require fake profiles to post automated contents.
Name: zaboravkk
E-mail: zaboravkk@gmail.com
Username: zaboravkk
Name: JesleanineVI
E-mail: jesseanline@aol.com
Username: Jesleanine
Here, you can find that a meaningless name is given as a username and email id is generated using that name. Moreover when we see the last login date of such profiles the count of it goes negative. Ultimately spammers creates these profiles just for self promotion and website promotion to attract more traffic for their websites and improve their site's rankings by manipulating search engine's algorithms.
Sometimes profile creation will be done on less frequently used pages in the most powerful and popular sites.
Last updated date, version of re-captcha etc along with the loopholes will be taken into account to hijack that particular category.
Responsibilities of a forum moderator or forum member
As a member you should avoid posting response to spammer's postings. It makes the work of the moderator much more difficult than usual. Try to avoid clicking on their links when you identify irrelevant content. Report the spam to the forum via report spam/flag abuse button provided in the forum.
As a moderator take spam seriously and take every precautionary step possible. Delete the spammers and also the spam posts as well. Develop zero tolerance as loyalty to your faithful members is more important. Report confirmed spam's to the database available online.
Wish to tell if someone is a spammer?
Site like stopforumspam.com/ provide lists of spammers that persist in abusing forums and blogs with their scams, rip-offs, exploits and other annoyances. They also provide a database in which you can add the spammer details. This step can also be automated.
 |
Images |
 |
Screen Shots |
 |
Graph |
This is the summary of the submissions on record, showing the steady growth of spam on forums and blogs.
 |
Flash and interactive stuffs |
-
A Video on Automated forum posts.
-
Automatic forum profile creation.
 |
Working Examples |
 |
References |
 |
Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |