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Jack comments on Who are these spammers? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (28)
That seems like a lot of effort for a bunch of scam artists. And even with lots of accounts I feel like it would be difficult for them to get 5-karma here.
Getting 5 karma is so utterly trivial for the kind of person who is capable of writing spambots that giving a step by step guide does not even seem like it would be giving anything significant away.
Are the people who write spambots writing them with the intention of spamming here, or the intention of spamming reddits in general? Here seems like wasted effort.
I suspect the spam is targeted more at search engine bots than forum members, the goal being to boost the ranking of the spammer's website in search results.
If that's the case, then when a page is hidden the metadata should be updated to remove it from the search indexes. If you search 'pandora site:lesswrong.com' on Google, all the pages are still there, and can be followed back to LW. That is to say, the spammers are still benefiting from every piece of spam they've ever posted here.
Emphasising parent. If spammers don't get any benefit from including this site in their bots then they are less likely to take the effort to include it - and the effort of handling catphcas and configuring to local conditions.
I just did the search and noticed that both HP:MoR and RationalWiki://lesswrong make it onto the first page. Neither of them include the word 'pandora'. That's impressive!
I'd expect forums in general, with a module here and there for "Reddits" and specific instance thereof.
They're not going to reprogram their spambots for what must be a tiny fraction of their audience. Hell, they're not even going to notice it stopped working here.
We are not the audience. The audience is Google PageRank.
Yes I realized that after I posted- the point remains.
Your point underestimates the value of having incoming links from a lot of different high ranked sites. It also, I assume, overestimates the difficulty of adapting a spambot and underestimates the likelyhood that the outcome would be check.
Spamming a site does actually require ongoing effort. A steady stream of account creation, captcha passing, email account creation and IP address sourcing. A click to check that it works does not seem unlikely. Mind you that click would probably go along with the click to test incoming links from all sources - and lesswrong would still be going along just fine there.
Hmmm. You might be right. Are links from Less Wrong actually that valuable that they would spend time designing ways to spam our site in particular? It seems like there would be more low-hanging fruit for them to target.
Hard to say without knowing more about them (than I'd care to bother with. :P) Lesswrong links would be more valuable than the majority of the forums out there that are readily spammable but I am not sure how broad there spambot net is.
By way of ballpark estimate I too would be surprised if they bothered to create mutual upvote scenarios. (I'd expect them to just switch to comment spam if anything.)
In fact, it never worked here. OP:
They could be doing something weirder, but there are exhortations to click, so it's probably just broken.
Some of them contain links.
We are not supposed to be the ones clicking them. (And the few posts I glanced at did contain links, for what it is worth.)
For topynate's suggested search, I find 3 of the first 20 hits contain links. This is not what it would look like if they were checking their work.
nofollow is a solution to the problem of spamming google. Nofollow as a function of karma would be pretty nice, but might not fit the codebase well.
I kind of like the idea of retargetting all 'pandora' links (and adding links to all pandora posts lacking them) such that they all link to the official pandora jewellry site. Mostly just for fun.