A spam bot (short for robot) is a computer that goes around the internet posting ads and links to web sites. They like to hit all of the blogs and forums where people can create an account and post whatever they want. In this case the computer will create an account on the forum, then either post a message with a link to the web site they are promoting or just put a link in their signature or other profile location.
Most of the ones we ban are because they put a link to their web site somewhere in their profile. They never even post a message anywhere. They aren't really here to post at all, they just want to have the link in there somewhere. They put it in their profile because most of the time it would go undetected, and therefore not be deleted by a moderator. The only way anyone would ever see it, since they never post anything, would be for them to browse through the member list, then actually click to see the spammer's profile. Of course that's not going to happen. So it is a very desperate way to get a link to your web site if you are trying to get
people to see it.
However, there actually is a more sinister motive, and the profile link works great for this. Search engines like Google emphasize web sites that have the most links to them. If you search for "banana", you will see millions of sites. Which site should Google list first? They are sorted with the sites who have the most external links occurring at the top of the list. So a site about bananas that has a million links will be listed ahead of a site about bananas with only a thousand links. The thinking there is that those sites are the most popular and are more likely to be the "banana" site you are looking for.
This algorithm was a major search engine breakthrough when Google first started doing it, and is actually what caused them to grow and become such a huge company. I posted a pie chart
here the other day showing that 98% of the people who use a search engine to find our site use Google instead of Yahoo, Bing, and any of the others. Their market domination for search engines is because they came up with this algorithm to cause the most popular sites to bubble up to the top of the list.
This worked fantastic when they first started doing it. All of the links were legitimate then because there weren't any spam bots. A link meant that a real person somewhere in the world liked the site and in effect "voted" for it by putting up the link. But when people began to realize how the algorithm worked, a whole army of spammers sprung up with the goal of trying to manipulate the search results by artificially inserting illegitimate links to their site all over the place.
Since the spam bots don't ever post a message, on most forums they will go completely undetected. So, by going around to every possible blog, forum, or other site that allows anyone to post messages, they are able to get their link in there. Then when the Google bot comes along to read the site and find out what it is about, it will see the link to the spammer's web site because the Google bot will actually go to that member profile (or so the spammer thinks). They think that Google looks at everything, including the profile. At many sites this is true because the member list is available to the public. In theory this will increase their link count, and thereby move them higher up in the list when someone searches for whatever it is that they are selling.
What they don't realize though is that you can't see our member list unless you are a member yourself. And the Google bot is not a member, so it never even sees the member list or the links they put in there. So they are just wasting their time (and ours) when they sign up here. But we do go back and ban them as soon as they post the link in their profile, just on a matter of principle.
It is not that hard to throw a monkey wrench in there and stop the computer spammers. If you make your forum just a little different than the others they won't be able to handle it. The point of the computer spammer is to hit all of the forums in an automated way, so they are not that sophisticated when it comes to figuring out why they can't create an account on your forum if you differ from the default installation. They just skip you and move on, possibly adding your site to a list for a real person to come back to later. I think we have enough things in place right now to mess up the computer spammers.
I think that most of the spammers we see are real people who are basically doing the same thing, but in a manual way, one site at a time. It would be just about impossible to prevent spammers who are real people from signing up, simply because you don't know if they are here to spam or here to talk sports. You have to wait and see what their intention is and ban them after the fact. We had one recently who came around and posted 3 different messages that were somewhat on topic, but odd. It was obviously someone who was not a big sports fan. Then they finally came back and changed their profile to have the link, thinking we wouldn't notice since they seemed to be posting real messages.
I happened to be online at the time and was watching them when this happened. I gave them the InstaBan (patent pending). Basically this is where I have the ban page already set up with everything filled out, just waiting for me to hit the button to make it a done deal. Then I watched as they went to their profile page. I knew what they were up to. I loaded their profile page in another window and hit refresh every minute or so. As soon as the new profile showed up with the link, I switched back over to the ban window and hit the button. BAM! Their link was in there for maybe 30 seconds. I love to do this to them when I get the chance. It must really break their spirit to know they have wasted all of this time setting up the account, making some fake posts, and then they get banned instantly as soon as the reveal themselves to be a spammer. It doesn't always work out that way, but I sure do enjoy it when it does.
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