Oh noez where does teh spam come from, teh captchas do nothing?
That is because they are no bots. They are humans in some country like india or whatever and basically they get paid to post spam.

The idea is that search engines will pick up the links in their signature or profile and thus increase page rank.

Example
ie viewtopic.php?f=14&t=25929


google for his nick: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=adamden02
He is registered in THOUSANDS of forums, always having 1 post, always posting something vaguely related and always with the same links in profile or signature.

It might be semi-automatic:
1) Software searches for new forums and registers
2) human solves captcha
3) human reads thread and posts some crap that seems legit if not looked at closely. "thanks for link!" "i like that game too!" etc.


Surely posters would notice such useless postings on their forum.
No. It is easy to write crap on people will not even notice or just think it is trolling.
See the postings of this account:
search.php?author_id=10901&sr=posts
Seems legit when just scrolling through the thread but if you look closely: No posting makes any sense and just repeats what others said.
(Also note the link in the profile)

And on most forums you can tell the difference anyway because quality of posting is low anyway and nobody cares:
ie http://www.stonerforums.com/lounge/vide ... -city.html
Or about any gaming message board.

But even on springrts it works.
Pretty cool huh.

FUK. i was sure broderickvam is bot. after last guy who was talking strange things but turned out to be legit, didnt want to risk :D

i feel pwnd ;_;

It's sad when real humans fail the Turing test.

I think I've banned like 4 of these over the course of the last week.

if you just change the user ID in the url you can see how many there really are:

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=10889

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=10886

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=10883

memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=10880

search.php?author_id=10870&sr=posts

...
..
.

seems often moderators deleted the post but did not delete the account.
If they notice that accounts are not deleted, they will keep registering, for search engines to find the links in the profiles.
And some will keep spamming.

So circumvent them and disallow search engines to crawl profile pages.

User ID in the url tells bots Moderators can ban and the Turing test will disallow spam by search engine.

Haha, are those posts seriously human? Who exactly pays them? And just how effective are these spammers that the companies or whatever find a profit in paying them?

I am 99% sure they are human. Wages in some countries are low enough that you can probally run a whole spam center...
How that makes money though, I have no idea.
Even "enlarge your penis" spam can work if just one idiot falls for it and buys some pills for $100.

This adamden02 just links to a page with (bad) flashgames. There are not even ads on it (or they got blocked lol)

Imagine a "human bot" posting in forums about human bots and how they function ^^...

The software Xrumer(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRumer) does it all automatically (800$ + monthly fee). And then there are tools like Senuke or Scrapeboard, they post automatically and the captchas get solved by a service like deathbycaptcha ($1.39 for 1000 solved CAPTCHAs.). These solving services send the captcha to india or the philippines and the solved strings are sent back to the program which inserts it automatically. So in the spammers point of view it's done automatically aswell. All you need is a fast pc. Just don't let them post here or this forum will end in an a u t o a p p r o v e list. Then you get like thounsands a day. I know all about it.

Profit is huge... They bost their SEO with it. I am making money myself too through affiliate marketing.

http://www.stopforumspam.com/ appears to house a database of information regarding forum spammers, along with an API we could implement to blacklist these guys.

Perhaps with some edit sniping we can turn it into a highly productive forum post

lately when i clicked the "Our newest member is" thing for lolz, i was always a spam account.
ie right now it shows alex13689 (memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=10908)

most do not post though are seem just happy with being scanned by search engines.

Now I am wondering if springrts.com has lots of spam stuff on it, will it get a lower rating on google?

That depends, some of Google's page weighting is manual, some is automated.

We've been banning them as they post, I'm leery of banning by IP in the developing world because IP change hands and these countries are going to be an increasing source of players in the long term. I've been considering outright deleting their accounts after banning them, but did not feel that was necessary.

EDIT: I banned broderick after seeing one of his posts, so at least this behaviour isn't fooling me.

Do you use phpbb modules to fight against bots efficiently ?

if deleting/banning is the same amount of work I would say just delete.

I became a shareholder of that spam company to stop the whole thing. Turns out on the annual shareholder meeting, they dont have anything to do with advertising, they just make food.

Profiles can't be seen without logging in.

(Unless phpbb has some weird stuff in it that makes profiles visible to google bots (it detects google bot presence after all...))

Googlebot is logged in. It can index profilepages aswell.

It appears on this forum bots do not have permission to view memberlist/profile pages.