I've been a Moderator for a community that centers around a specific vehicle. The company that owns that Board has hundreds of sites all using Xenforo which has been heavily modified. As a Moderator I can do quite a bit but am quite limited in some areas.
Though I've been on staff for many years now only a couple of weeks ago I noticed that a lot of Spam accounts were managing to get through the approval process... which in this case is automatic unless the IP matches up with a banned IP address. The only member accounts I can see on a list as a Moderator are the last 12 that joined. That's where I noticed a bunch of obvious spam accounts. Clearly, I'd not visited the member page in years
. It's a busy site. We typically get a couple dozen or so new accounts most days.
In the last two weeks I've managed to eliminate over 400 spam accounts from several locations around the world, but mostly from Viet Nam, India, and New York City. When I process an account as spam, any other existing accounts with the same IP will pop up in a list. When I first started this project, a dozen or more additional existing accounts with the same IP would pop up whenever I spam-banned an account.
No matter how long an account has been on the site, none of the spam accounts have ever made a post or been active in any way. One thing 99% of them have in common is they include their web address and a description of what they're about in their profile.
The only benefit I can imagine is that they join hundreds of Boards and ultimately have a link to their web address located on hundreds of websites and that in turn creates a greater possibility of their site showing up in web searches since search algorithms take into consideration the number of links to your website from other web sites.
Can anyone think of any other benefit to these yahoos?
On a side note, we've eliminated over a hundred spam accounts on this website and watch for them daily. In our case the spammers were most often from India. We're getting fewer and fewer attempts by these spammers but it's something we'll always need to be vigilant about.
Though I've been on staff for many years now only a couple of weeks ago I noticed that a lot of Spam accounts were managing to get through the approval process... which in this case is automatic unless the IP matches up with a banned IP address. The only member accounts I can see on a list as a Moderator are the last 12 that joined. That's where I noticed a bunch of obvious spam accounts. Clearly, I'd not visited the member page in years
. It's a busy site. We typically get a couple dozen or so new accounts most days.In the last two weeks I've managed to eliminate over 400 spam accounts from several locations around the world, but mostly from Viet Nam, India, and New York City. When I process an account as spam, any other existing accounts with the same IP will pop up in a list. When I first started this project, a dozen or more additional existing accounts with the same IP would pop up whenever I spam-banned an account.
No matter how long an account has been on the site, none of the spam accounts have ever made a post or been active in any way. One thing 99% of them have in common is they include their web address and a description of what they're about in their profile.
The only benefit I can imagine is that they join hundreds of Boards and ultimately have a link to their web address located on hundreds of websites and that in turn creates a greater possibility of their site showing up in web searches since search algorithms take into consideration the number of links to your website from other web sites.
Can anyone think of any other benefit to these yahoos?
On a side note, we've eliminated over a hundred spam accounts on this website and watch for them daily. In our case the spammers were most often from India. We're getting fewer and fewer attempts by these spammers but it's something we'll always need to be vigilant about.
