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Jack comments on Who are these spammers? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (28)
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.