Quote:
Originally Posted by Cookiez17
I assume it has to be using a program to spam that hard.
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There's a mix but vast majority is programmatic. Years ago I read of spam operations that hired people in extremely low wage countries to post spam and other operations that used these low wage employees to solve the CAPTCHA anti-bot puzzles all day and the bots did the rest.
There are MS Windows based programs that people run on their computers even just for spamming forums. Then programs on servers. And bot nets that run through virus infected computers/servers & are controlled remotely. There could even be people here reading this whose computer is part of a bot net and they don't even know it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by carnation
We had one about 10 years ago that was Indian astrologer spam. It was awful.
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Dozens and dozens of bot spammers, the astrologer spam was probably the worst of it. We may have even had hundreds of automated spammers, not all posted in such huge amounts. They registered many thousands of accounts for posting spam. Some would register and not post spam for months or a year+ later. There were some bots that attempted to post normal messages, then after some time they would return & edit their messages to add in their spam links. Also spam bots that used to post links that were difficult to notice, semi-hidden. I also know of at least one instance where bots were able to guess an easy password on a GC account, went back and edited nearly a thousand messages just adding in various spam links.
In addition to the Indian astrology spam I recall some major fashion brand spamming GC for a long time as well. There was also a celebrity who must have hired spammers to promote her new show... I emailed them and told them to just sponsor GC to promote their show instead of spamming us.
Then my email... one account was receiving 8000+ emails a day when I decided to shut it down.
The spam on the forums and email was a real nightmare to deal with. May have been impossible to handle all that without the help of many site moderators.
GC also wasn't my only forum site. The other forums I shut down new account registrations on years ago. Was just too overwhelming to continue dealing with all the spam / spambots littering the sites with spam from every different direction.
On GC I made it difficult to easily create/verify new accounts and also use a crowd sourced spam detection service, which is quite imperfect and probably has too many false positives. That service has been used to block something like 10 million + account registrations on GC. I often wonder, though, about their false positive rate. Even 1% would be a huge loss. At some point I'll get around to looking into that more and will post additional details.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek
And here I was thinking that when they’re working as a group, they all know about each other. Like, they’re in a hidden room together doing this. I’m so naive, lol.
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I don't know which is the most common way. There's surely a mix. Some are groups all knowing and working together. Others work together but do not know each other. And still others work alone or mostly alone.
Hybrid Mode
