Please report sneaky stealth link spammers

[MetroMPG]

If everyone would keep an eye out for "stealth" link spammers, that would be good. It's a relatively new tactic, where they quote someone, but the giveaway is they underline some or all of the quote, and then hide a link to their site among the underlined words.

They may type a sentence or two that marginally (or usually not) contributes to the thread they're in.

Essentially they're trying to hi-jack EM's good name & reputation. Links from EM to their sites help drive traffic and (mostly) improve their search engine rankings.

Here's an example of what you may see:

If everyone would keep an eye out for "stealth" link spammers, that would be good. It's a relatively new tactic, where they quote someone, but the giveaway is they underline some or all of the quote, and then hide a link to their site among the underlined words.

They may type a sentence or two that marginally (or usually not) contributes forkenswift to the thread they're in.

Note the sneaky forkenswift link in the last sentence. Oh, so sneaky!

I've banned a couple of spammers this week, but sometimes they fly below my radar and I may not catch them all.

Thanks!

[dcb]

add a filter, notify yourself if a new or modified post has a lot of underlined text with links in it. That's what computers are for

[Clev]

Originally Posted by dcb

add a filter, notify yourself if a new or modified post has a lot of underlined text with links in it. That's what computers are for

I guess I'll have to start underlining all of my text just to mess with him. :-)

[LeanBurninating]

hmmm smarty pants!

Well in case technology doesn't solve everybody's problems, I will def keep an eye out.

Edit: ^ Now THAT is funny.

[dcb]

You guys are screwing around, I'm serious!

[SVOboy]

I don't think vbulletin is that smart, but darin can check it out!

[dcb]

I'm no vbulletin expert, but it is written in php, which is that smart. Might want to add a spam detection hook to the message body on save/update to notify the mods, assuming such a hook doesn't already exist (or get the vbulletin folks to do it).

Edit: I see they have things like auto moderation by keyword
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showt...hlight=spammer

so that a mod would have to approve such a message first.

[FastPlastic]

Seems to me like it should meet four parameters before automatically raising a red flag.
1. Quoted text in post
2. Quoted text contains a Link
3. Link surrounded by underline text - Excessive underline would work fine
4. Link points outside of Ecomodder.com

[elhigh]

I'll def keep my eyes peeled. I hate spammers and everything about them. They're predators eating up our time and bandwidth, without adding anything to the conversation. So screw 'em.

[NeilBlanchard]

The easiest way to do this is to use the red triangular ! icon in the lower left corner of the suspicious post...click on that and the post is tagged and sent to the admin.