The rise of SPAM
The site seems to be getting more attention from SPAM operators. I got a message sent to a group I'm in from a 'R*se Albert' to "Just complete our surv*y and take part in our pr*motion campaign to receive your K**** retail card." with a link in the email from Mohawk's Rock to some site outside.
This is a particularly bad form of spam, because the link is directly sent to your email and will likely take you to another webpage that will try and install malware on your PC.
One thing I noticed, for anyone who has made a Group, you can untick the option to let people send a message to everyone in the Group - this would stop the spam like we got recently from 'R*se Albert'
'Hilary B*cker' was one of the first false accounts that spammed nearly everyone a few months ago, there was another I think that got deleted, and now we have 'R*se Albert' - both in the last few weeks.
I came across a blog from Google warning how leaving these spam accounts and their spam messages on a social networking site can lead to search engines losing trust in the site. (Probably would reduce the sites ranking in their results so it appears lower down.)
They explain why spam is targetting us on both big and small social networking sites:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/spam20-fake-user...
I hope you will help fight this tide of spam, by deleting it from comments (click X at right of them on your profile comments). And for owners of Groups, edit them to prevent members sending messages to the whole group.
Also, discuss other ways to help stop them here and protect folk from spam, viruses and phishing here.
Any questions or worries about this, feel free to ask here too!
Views: 173
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Kobalos on
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Just received 39 comments from a new spam account on the site called www.m*kem*n*yw*th-*****.com. Looks like everyone got really spammed by this one! :O
NOTE: This ain't anything to do with google! DO NOT CLICK, block them and please remove the links they've left in your comments.
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Permalink Reply by Giant Mohawk Man on
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Thank you Kobalos!
Yes, I've been banning and deleting accounts with much more frequency lately, but having people like yourself, sega and khaos watching out for the community really helps.
I've started setting up some other techniques as well to try and find them but our best defense is you all letting me know. For spammers, definitely send me a direct message and they are being deleted with the quickness. I have a new option that allows me to "suspend". This means if they really are trying to be a legitimate part of the site then they can try to plea to come back on with their content.
Looking forward to reading the article, since really SEO and Word of Mouth are the only two ways people tend to find this site although its now ranked in the top 250,000 in the world (which is probably why we are seeing more spam).
This forum = featured.
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The newest defense I've set up is to require all new members to supply a profile picture. This should 1) make it a little harder to automate creating profiles, 2) a little slower for real people to create and 3) make it easier for us to identify fake mohawk rockers.
Membership may not grow as fast, but we've got 3000 members with many dormants, and those active members all have pictures, so those are the ones we want here anyhow.
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That sounds a good idea - it's a bit more effort for them. They'll need to actually send a human - since the picture uploading isn't just a plain form field they can fill automatically, I think...
And yeah, having profile pics is good anyway - makes it a lot easier to recognise who's who.
I think the trouble with spam is that it survives because it only needs 1 in 200 hundred people to bother to click a link and folk get bored and just try it at random, just to see. The trouble is the ones that do don't realise what they are clicking could let in (in the background) is some hidden virus that slows their PC down or disables it.
Spammers can always use our PC's to send out mass emails, decode Captcha images or create lots of connections for deniel of service attacks all slowing the Internet for everyone by putting more load on it.
And by clicking on a spam link and visiting a site it could end up making their own PC run slower or they'll end up getting endless advert pop-up windows annoying them.
Still, people still click and spam keeps rising. So everything you're doing to help protect your site is great and well worth it.
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Permalink Reply by Khaos on
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If i remember correctly, GMM has a pretty decent system in place. Some bots are dormant (I remember one I found sometime ago that was around I think when I joined) or jump on cause they had assistance.
Plus, we have awesome people who aren't afraid to raise the flag, whether it's via forum or commenting to let people know we have spam about. ^.^
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Hillary Becker is the only spam profile I've left around as she was really the original spam bot and its hilarious to read the comments about how she got beat down mercilessly upon her arrival.
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Ironically, I got hit by the new automatic spam-detecting filter on the site. My account was disabled (though my profile and all my posts, etc. where still available).
I just got a reply from NING explaining that their spam detection system had tripped on my last post. I suspect it was because I included a link in a long post on a group, a few days ago.
So, if you find your account is disabled on logging in, just click the link they offer to tell them that you think this has been done by mistake and they will verify it and get back to you, re-enabling your account (providing you didn't actually leave any spam, I guess. heh heh).
I'm pleased though that NING are treating potential spam fairly strictly now and stopping the likelihood of the mass spams we've had in the past from one account.
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Ah very interesting Kobalos. Thanks for reporting this. I've had several people e-maililng me about account log-in issues, may have something to do with this as they may not read as carefully as you did. Thanks for being such a good advocate out there helping us all out.
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We have a new spammer member, called "Mariela Tyree".
Please, if you get a link from them, do not click it! It's leaving various money scam offer comments that have nothing to do with Mohawks Rock.
I've let Giant Mohawk Man (our site owner) know and hopefully the comments will be automatically deleted once their profile is checked.
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