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Will the spam never stop?

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Just talk

When you hear about spam in the news, they're always talking about email spam... but of late, the spammers are taking a different tack, and it seems that they're not giving up without a fight.

I'm a moderator on the Slax Linux forums, and I spend a lot of time looking around the internet on other forums and reading blogs. A huge problem I've noticed is the prevalence of spam bots trolling forums and blogs to post website links. It's become so bad on our forums, which we allow guest posters on because it's a help forum more than anything else, that we've completely disallowed posts with urls in them.

The main question in my mind is, how do these spammers expect to make money? People don't click on those links, or go to those websites anymore. On a forum, it usually gets reported to a moderator, and it's deleted without any further thought. Or, the bot is flamed, which accomplishes nothing but seems to make people feel better.

What also amazes me, is that these posts seem to come from botnets. Why do people still have this software on their computers? I'd be relieved if the world moved to Linux, where you're not as likely to have a zombie computer mindlessly spamming day and night.

On top of all this, we have the fact that spam bots even exist. I've searched fruitlessly for the past three weeks for a bot that DELETES forum spam... why is it that a programmer will sacrifice morals and ethics to create software enabling these leeches, and yet nobody has yet come up with the flip side, a bot that sits there, analyzing every post that comes through and deleting what it knows to be junk? I guess the task falls to me.

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re: spam

I hear ya. That's why I had to discontinue anonymous comments. I hated to do it and comments went way down, but otherwise I would have to spend a lot of time deleting spam comments. Some other sites have had to discontinue allowing submission of content as well as anonymous comments due to the those spammers.

And lately one of my email addys that rarely gets given out has been receiving lots of lots spam.

It's an annoyance, but moreover it's getting to where it's gonna be hard for the legitimate smalltime mail servers to pass some of the new authentication methods being explorered.

Well, I don't use mine anymore anyway - due to fscking spammers first flooding it trying to relay thru it but then hitting my site with ddos attacks too trying to cover it up.

I've always said spammers should be shot at sunrise without trial! Big Grin

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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?

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