(no subject)
Jan. 8th, 2012 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
not_my_sandboxI need some sort of userpic for this. Hmm.
Well, Zed gave me admin powers on the wiki. I should have known from the recent changes log of the fandomwank wiki that handing out bans and blocks left and right wouldn't do much to alleviate the spam. I have noticed that a few account creation attempts have been blocked but for the most part, account creation goes on at the same rate it has always gone. Of course, the spammers are using proxies and possibly botnets. IP blocks won't do shit.
The spammers don't actually do the spamming themselves. They use automated scripts. There are a couple out there just for the purposes of spamming wikis, php bulletin boards, lj's and its fork's comment pages, wordpress and joomla sites, twitter, facebook, etc. And through the wonderful mathematics of Markov chains, they are able to create comments and articles that can fool a spiderbot into thinking it is legitimate content and not just spam. To human eyes, it is still jibberish, but human eyes --wait, strike that-- intelligent human eyes, do not matter so much as search rank does. They eyes of the computer illiterate, the gullible, and the desperate matter too, because after all, for some of these spammers search rank isn't the ultimate goal in and of itself.
I am slightly tempted to go off in search of these scripts and programs for myself, but download links to such things are spammed as well. It would be very easy to serve up malware to novice computer security geeks and to people who want to get into the spamming business. Desperation, gullibility, and illiteracy are very dangerous for those who use the internet. Well, they are dangerous everywhere. They are the friends of the spammer and all sorts of criminals.
So, I won't give into desperation.
I'll just note how the spammers operate on the wiki without providing a bridge, because I think I've wandered off topic.
At the same time some of the spammers are actually creating their own websites by scraping together content.
There are several distinct spammers judging by the content of the pages they put up.
Ok, I am tired of talking about this. I expect that someday I will find this post or parts of it at the wiki as spam content. Oh well, it will be good for a laugh. This post will probably attract spam comments unless DW is super awesome.
Well, Zed gave me admin powers on the wiki. I should have known from the recent changes log of the fandomwank wiki that handing out bans and blocks left and right wouldn't do much to alleviate the spam. I have noticed that a few account creation attempts have been blocked but for the most part, account creation goes on at the same rate it has always gone. Of course, the spammers are using proxies and possibly botnets. IP blocks won't do shit.
The spammers don't actually do the spamming themselves. They use automated scripts. There are a couple out there just for the purposes of spamming wikis, php bulletin boards, lj's and its fork's comment pages, wordpress and joomla sites, twitter, facebook, etc. And through the wonderful mathematics of Markov chains, they are able to create comments and articles that can fool a spiderbot into thinking it is legitimate content and not just spam. To human eyes, it is still jibberish, but human eyes --wait, strike that-- intelligent human eyes, do not matter so much as search rank does. They eyes of the computer illiterate, the gullible, and the desperate matter too, because after all, for some of these spammers search rank isn't the ultimate goal in and of itself.
I am slightly tempted to go off in search of these scripts and programs for myself, but download links to such things are spammed as well. It would be very easy to serve up malware to novice computer security geeks and to people who want to get into the spamming business. Desperation, gullibility, and illiteracy are very dangerous for those who use the internet. Well, they are dangerous everywhere. They are the friends of the spammer and all sorts of criminals.
So, I won't give into desperation.
I'll just note how the spammers operate on the wiki without providing a bridge, because I think I've wandered off topic.
- Create a new account
- Find content somehow related to your link from somewhere or several somewheres and run it through a marvov filter to switch out some words and peice the content together
- Create new page with new content
- Never use that account again, it might get banned anyway
At the same time some of the spammers are actually creating their own websites by scraping together content.
There are several distinct spammers judging by the content of the pages they put up.
Ok, I am tired of talking about this. I expect that someday I will find this post or parts of it at the wiki as spam content. Oh well, it will be good for a laugh. This post will probably attract spam comments unless DW is super awesome.
