Strange News Articles. Penis enlargement etc.

So all member's blogs turned into "News" with the update, and blogs used to be able to link to an RSS feed/connect to auto post from something like tumblr/twitter. I think quite a few of the spambots found it and starting to go ham on it

Yeah we might have some cleanup to do. We can nuke users if there is too much spam found.

Report any links you see to a mod.

Ahaha oh god. This is hilarious. But for the most part I think NS' mods are keeping the forum spam to a minimum. A few quieter forums I'm on that don't have a big mod force get sooo much dumb advertising spam...

Part of that is the fact that we're built off of custom code. Its SO much easier to keep a completely custom codebase free of Spam, as it doesn't have the same economy of scale as something like phpBB does for the spam companies.

Occassionally we get hit with a barrage and have to do some fighting to beat it, but for the most part (knock on wood) things so far have been pretty good.

Mix that with a lighting fast mod team and we're good to go for the most part.

Sweet, keep it up. Sooo annoying on other forums...

What is interesting that we found out is in actual truth there is relatively few big spamming software sets that are used. I was turned onto figuring out all the 'black hat' techniques by someone in that industry, and my first taste was learning about 'xrumer'. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer)

So basically the software providers crack the various spam-prevention techniques and launch it out to all their software. (forgive basic understanding) When this happens, you'll get an assault of spam. It is true that there are manual capcha breakers (literally people sitting at desks in china/india) but they cost per 1,000 broken capchas. So this is only the really high end stuff. Most of the low brow things you simply have to keep one step ahead of the software and you can really cut down on spam.

For instance when we had that massive wave of spam on NS, it was when we finally were big enough for someone to set up the software to spam it. We thought we were under attack by farms of forced labor 'spam squads' - which can't be beaten by capchas or other easy methods.

However, we added the question of 'name a ski company' on sign up, and blammo. Done.

At another forum that i visit they simply add and remove questions periodically to the registration process that breaks the spam software. Cuts down immensely.

Spam is just one of those wars of the internet. You go back and forth forever.

yo bishop why arent you a redname anymore? unless its just my computer thats being weird

I tried to make a joke in NSG about not being staff anymore on my 10,000th post.

It ended up being stupid, but I'm trying on blue for the day.

give it to me for the day.