Spammers - Had Any Recent Dealings with Them?
Michael Paul Cote | March 1, 2006
You mean besides having anywhere from 100 to 250 spam messages sent to my email over a weekend. Nah!
Lori Lancaster | March 1, 2006
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John E Gunter | March 1, 2006
I started to, but his IP kept changing, so I knew that wasn't going to work. I imagine the reason it's changing is due to a similar reason my IP changes from time to time.
John
Steve Dunn | March 1, 2006
Man, over at the BTD Forum we get spammers who register!! That's hardcore. We've actually had some funny conversations with spammers. This one had to be the best: (link)
The guy's animated graphic alone is worth the price of admission.
There have been several others. More disturbing still, I've heard there are marketing firms who employ people to post to message boards! They explicitly try to insinuate themselves into various communities, and don't start pitching products until they're well established.
I can certainly see something like this working. We talk about movies and music and TV all the time at BTD (just like here) so if someone throws out a recommendation, people really might act on it. I don't think the marketers would want to waste their time with relatively small sites, but who knows?
Oh and by the way, has anyone heard the latest My Morning Jacket album? It's awesome! Do yourself a favor and go buy it right now!
Erik Bates | March 2, 2006
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Amy Austin | March 2, 2006
Okay, so "drinking unicorn giggles" = dead giveaway verbiage to a forum plant... I'm on it.
John E Gunter | March 3, 2006
Yeah, those comics don't really surprise me Erik, a forum I frequent had the post below appear on it back on Feb 21.
Anyone reading Kings' new zombie novel
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Hi everyone, I usually just lurk on the boards, but recently started reading Stephen Kings' new novel Cell and was surprised no one has mentioned it yet. In the novel cell phones deliver some sort of "pulse" that wipes away the humanity of unsuspecting cell phone users, leaving only agressive and destructive impulses behind. People who are without cell phones during the "pulse" must fight for survival.
One of the main characters is a comic book illustrator named Clayton Riddell who is trying to reach his son during this crisis. Sound familiar? Any way, King throws a couple of twist in this story that I don't want to spoil by giving too much away. The story so far is entertaining, but I'm only half way through. Its an interesting "Dead World" in any case. Oh, by the way the novel is dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero. Cool.
The forum is powered by ezboard, and the person who posted it is a global account and they only have made 1 post in the time they've had that account. So I'm somewhat suspicious of the validity of the post.
Oh the other thing that clinches this post, we already had over a dozen comments about the book in a couple of other posts on the forum, so it makes me wonder as to where has this person been lurking! I felt like pointing out that the person appeared to not really be a member of the forums and they were just plugging the book, but decided not to even add a comment to the thread. Interestingly enough, it's dropped off of the front page and will probably continue to move deeper into the unread pages. At least that's my hope!
By the way, I think the comics are really funny!
John
Lori Lancaster | March 3, 2006
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Aaron Shurtleff | March 3, 2006
Actually, I think Good Omens is co-authored by Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, but I whole-heartedly agree! :)
I really had nothing else to contribute.
Scott Hardie | March 8, 2006
Good Omens is an excellent read, Lori! You can't stop laughing at the non-stop hilarity of Terry Pratchett (Discworld). I dare you to buy the book and try! And then there's Neil Gaiman (Sandman) to make you think. He'll get you so wrapped up, you'll want to tell all your friends to buy the book too so you can discuss it together! I don't want to spoil any surprises for those of you who will go right to the publisher's website right now and buy the book, but let's just say there's no shortage of chills, spills, and thrills from two of your favorite authors! And don't miss the rest of Terry Pratchett's side-splitting series while you're at it. You'll want to buy them all!
Lori Lancaster | March 8, 2006
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John E Gunter | March 1, 2006
I've really gotten tired of spammers, every year they get better and better with the way that they manage to infiltrate our lifes with their garbage! Why do I mention this?
Well, I have a web forum that I run for the Tampa Bay area that I was hoping would help people interested in the gaming hobby, from video games to board games. Unfortunately, the forum hasn't taken off as much as I'd like it to, but there's still activity on it, with the occasional visitor coming to post as well.
But over the past few weeks, I've had a spammer coming to the forum to post his/her garbage! For a while, it was only 1 post a week and so far has only happened in one of the sections of the forum.
Today when I went to check the forum, I noticed that this spammer had added no less than 6 posts of this worthless reading material. Basically the posts were of links to other websites. Now, I'm ok with people posting links to other sites, if they add some value to the forum.
What I don't want to see is postings like what this person was doing. Since they were constantly posting using a guest account, I finally decided to lock the forum down so that you had to be a registered user to post or edit posts. I really didn't want to restrict that forum to that extent as I didn't want to make people have to register.
But unfortunately, I've had to lock the forum so that only members of it will be able to post. It's times like this that make me think we'll never be rid of spammers.
So, has anyone else had a recent bad experience with a spammer(s)?
John