It's amazing how many spammer accounts get created on forums.

[Jonathan Leger]

I just ran the maintenance to delete the spam accounts that got created in the old forum (which wasn't good at preventing bots from creating bogus members to try and spam the forum).

About four out of every five accounts was a spammer account.

Wow.

[Darren123]

I know that forum spamming is a popular link building strategy, but 4 in 5 accounts is a huge amount! You must be on a script or 2 somewhere...

[Jonathan Leger]

I know that forum spamming is a popular link building strategy, but 4 in 5 accounts is a huge amount! You must be on a script or 2 somewhere...

The new security options in SMF 2 is preventing the spammers from creating bogus accounts, so that's a good thing.

[davidash2]

Man...you mean I won't be getting any more backlinks from this forum!!! (Just kidding, Jon!!)

[Jonathan Leger]

LOL. Exactly.

Here's the thing, though. They WEREN'T getting backlinks with the old forum. I disabled urls for people with less than 5 posts, and since they the spam filters prevented them posting their trash, they never made it to 5 posts.  So it wasn't doing them any good, but it was cluttering up the database.

[Michael Brown]

Funny thing is I have a forum where I teach Niche Marketing and Niche Building that has about 5k real members and about 10k real members in the course altogether.  On our forum we used to get about 20 bogus accounts signed up per day signing up and just spamming us to death.  We finally had to put measures in place to limit this.

Some simple scripting and then on top of that we made it to where we had to verify each account coming in.  It finally stopped the madness.  The amazing part was this was on a paid membership and the forum was hidden as we didn't want the serps to index.  My support staff was going a bit nuts for a few days while that was going on lol

[krlread]

I think the thing that stumps this "Old Geezer" is the time these folks burn up with trying to figure out ways to penetrate the forums, knowing the good forums will find them and then block them.

Think what would happen for them if they turned to 'honest" marketing in the forums. Instead of having a one time shot, if any shot at all, they would have their marketing shot over and over again. In addition as new members join the good forum the ongoing potential of "new clients" could be endless for them.

However, since these folks are going to try and pester the JLForums over and over again, you and I as members have the responsibility of letting the moderators know when we spot spamming or are being spammed directly from the forum. That will help the moderators and perhaps best of all it will help keep this forum being one of the most effective information place on the web.

Ken Leatherman
"The Old Geezer"

[Michael Brown]

I think the thing that stumps this "Old Geezer" is the time these folks burn up with trying to figure out ways to penetrate the forums, knowing the good forums will find them and then block them.

Think what would happen for them if they turned to 'honest" marketing in the forums. Instead of having a one time shot, if any shot at all, they would have their marketing shot over and over again. In addition as new members join the good forum the ongoing potential of "new clients" could be endless for them.

Ken,  I completely agree and this is something I've thought myself several times.  If they'd just focus on marketing their biz as much as they focus on spam they could be retiring soon

[Darren123]

I think the thing that stumps this "Old Geezer" is the time these folks burn up with trying to figure out ways to penetrate the forums, knowing the good forums will find them and then block them.

Think what would happen for them if they turned to 'honest" marketing in the forums. Instead of having a one time shot, if any shot at all, they would have their marketing shot over and over again. In addition as new members join the good forum the ongoing potential of "new clients" could be endless for them.

Ken,  I completely agree and this is something I've thought myself several times.  If they'd just focus on marketing their biz as much as they focus on spam they could be retiring soon

I totally agree, it is ultimately a short sighted link building technique. And indeed, if the amount of time put into spamming was taken to create and market a genuinely good site that is useful to people, then it is probably less work than spamming ultimately!

[andrewwilson]

I totally agree, it is ultimately a short sighted link building technique. And indeed, if the amount of time put into spamming was taken to create and market a genuinely good site that is useful to people, then it is probably less work than spamming ultimately!

The thing is though that for good or bad, it ain't short sighted - and I write as one who deals with this kind of signup every day.
The cost to the new 'member' of doing the signup is zero. The time taken to do the signup is, again, zero.
The benefit is expected to be a backlink to one's pages.
So, why NOT do it.

Stopping the problem is not too hard - I solved it by taking away the ability to get a live backlink to people who were not accepted contributors.
A while back though the bloke behind one of the better known forum signup and auto backlink building tools said something like this:
"Each time a person signs up to make an account on a  site, or posts and rss feed, an article or makes a blog post the Alexa rank of that site is increasing and that can be a real benefit to the sites receiving the traffic"

Now, this can be very true, I have seen it happen. I have also seen the effect of it happening and it is not just Alexa. At the least I am now able to command a higher rate for advertising on the site - because of the increased Alexa ranking, I get slightly better quality Adsense ads and hence conversions and revenues, my traffic overall has increased.
The cost to me?
A small amount of bandwidth that costs me nothing. I brought forward my plans to optimize my database and server so my site now runs faster and I closed down an unproductive section of the site.

If you ask me whether these spam signups were an issue I'd have to say that on balance they have not been.

BUT if I were to get much more of the content - articles and blog posts produced by these tools I might have a different perspective for a few days, but ultimately it'd result in better quality content on my site as I'd simply automate more of the review process and set the bar higher than it is now in order to slice off the autospun almost-English that passes for article marketing for most people who call themselves article marketers. To be honest, increasing the overall quality of the content on my site is a major goal and part of an ongoing initiative.

Oh, for the sake of disclosure, I use a tool that sets up forum profiles. We do not make spam posts to forums, or any other type of site, and I pride myself on NOT vandalising the interwebs.

[Darren123]

The thing is though that for good or bad, it ain't short sighted - and I write as one who deals with this kind of signup every day.
The cost to the new 'member' of doing the signup is zero. The time taken to do the signup is, again, zero.
The benefit is expected to be a backlink to one's pages.
So, why NOT do it.

Stopping the problem is not too hard - I solved it by taking away the ability to get a live backlink to people who were not accepted contributors.
A while back though the bloke behind one of the better known forum signup and auto backlink building tools said something like this:
"Each time a person signs up to make an account on a  site, or posts and rss feed, an article or makes a blog post the Alexa rank of that site is increasing and that can be a real benefit to the sites receiving the traffic"

Now, this can be very true, I have seen it happen. I have also seen the effect of it happening and it is not just Alexa. At the least I am now able to command a higher rate for advertising on the site - because of the increased Alexa ranking, I get slightly better quality Adsense ads and hence conversions and revenues, my traffic overall has increased.
The cost to me?
A small amount of bandwidth that costs me nothing. I brought forward my plans to optimize my database and server so my site now runs faster and I closed down an unproductive section of the site.

If you ask me whether these spam signups were an issue I'd have to say that on balance they have not been.

BUT if I were to get much more of the content - articles and blog posts produced by these tools I might have a different perspective for a few days, but ultimately it'd result in better quality content on my site as I'd simply automate more of the review process and set the bar higher than it is now in order to slice off the autospun almost-English that passes for article marketing for most people who call themselves article marketers. To be honest, increasing the overall quality of the content on my site is a major goal and part of an ongoing initiative.

Oh, for the sake of disclosure, I use a tool that sets up forum profiles. We do not make spam posts to forums, or any other type of site, and I pride myself on NOT vandalising the interwebs.

A convincing case - I will have to process that one...

[andrewwilson]

Darren, I have a habit of looking at the economic impact of 'stuff'. A result of training as an economist. Sometimes one arrives at counterintuitive conclusions as a result of such analysis.

I'd not suggest that my view was of universal application but I am a strong believer that it is not tools that cause problems but rather how we use them or react to their use.

[Darren123]

I'd not suggest that my view was of universal application but I am a strong believer that it is not tools that cause problems but rather how we use them or react to their use.

I completely agree with that. I use a lot of tools, and I did have a subscription to sick submitter for a while, however, I was eventually only using it for mass submission to article directories using (very well) spun content and also doing link directory submissions (which is a one shot deal per site anyhow). I did do forum profile mass links, but I was never comfortable with it personally and  I stopped. I never did mass blog commenting either, I just didn't feel right putting that process onto blog owners and forum owners. Then I found AMR and just switched to that instead of Sick, since you didn't have to submit to individual article dierctory platforms individually and you get a live link report, so much easier for just article submitting. I also use 1waylinks a lot too!

[John Lenaghan]

Here's the thing, though. They WEREN'T getting backlinks with the old forum. I disabled urls for people with less than 5 posts, and since they the spam filters prevented them posting their trash, they never made it to 5 posts.  So it wasn't doing them any good, but it was cluttering up the database.

I doubt that most of them ever checked to see if they were getting any benefit. I think most of the people who use these techniques don't really have a strategy for it, they just blast out as much junk as they can, as quickly as possible hoping that it's going to help them somehow.

John

[andrewwilson]

I doubt that most of them ever checked to see if they were getting any benefit. I think most of the people who use these techniques don't really have a strategy for it, they just blast out as much junk as they can, as quickly as possible hoping that it's going to help them somehow.

John

Why would one bother to check straight away if a link exists?
One is making hundreds of accounts and one knows that some links will not be working.

Later, one simply goes out, finds the links and uses SE Nukes indexer tool or whacks 'em into Scrapebox. Done right using the indexer one can expect to get over 50% of the functioning accounts indexed (Scrapebox is much less effective) - not a bad result for almost no work. Remember that one is not usually linking from forum profiles to one's money pages but to sites one or two levels removed from them.

This is about marginal cost and marginal utility.
What is the additional cost of each additional link generated by building forum profiles (marginal cost)? Almost zero.
What is the benefit of each additional link generated by building forum profiles (marginal utility)? Significantly more than zero.

So, as long as the benefit of building forum profiles is greater than the cost the sensible backlink builder will create forum profiles.

When I am building SE Nuke campaigns they will run for anything between a couple of weeks and a month. The time to set such a campaign up is a few minutes - less time than it takes to add a few articles to my own sites. The cost of using the software and additional tools remains the same whether they are used or not and, after the campaign is set in action there is no further need for my intervention. It is like having a robot employee. So, building forum profiles makes a whole heap of sense. I'd have a different take on this if SE Nuke were making spam posts on forum threads, but it doesn't, so I don't worry about it.