Human Spammers

C

Cosmic

Manners maketh man
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Does anyone have an idea what percentage, or how common, human spammers are compared to spam bots? Occasionally I encounter ones which are a bit too inconsistent or intelligent to be software. What about you?
 
I'd have to guess that it's somewhere in the 5-10% range. If you're counting people who sign up at a bunch of websites to sneak in links to their sites, then the number is probably higher. I'd have to agree with you though. Sometimes, the posts even appear well written, and they can easily sneak by moderators. It's a tough problem though, because even if you have things in place to stop human spam, if they're even remotely intelligent, they can find a way around it.
 
I've found most of these "human bots" don't have very good English grammar and spelling. I agree, though. With all of these new antispam measures, a lot of companies seem to be outsourcing to humans, instead of software made bots.
 
Agent_Zero said:
What are they spamming? I have yet to get any spammers, just trolls lol
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They just advertise stuff. 😛 Some post random copy+paste stuff and set signature links. Others do very elaborate things like this:

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pandaa said:
I'd have to guess that it's somewhere in the 5-10% range. If you're counting people who sign up at a bunch of websites to sneak in links to their sites, then the number is probably higher. I'd have to agree with you though. Sometimes, the posts even appear well written, and they can easily sneak by moderators. It's a tough problem though, because even if you have things in place to stop human spam, if they're even remotely intelligent, they can find a way around it.
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Agreed. 😛 It's amazing how spammers can slip by sometimes!
 
Haven't really had any in the past, that I am aware of. Most of mine has been bots that just sign up and put in a website field or signature spam.
 
I am one of the best spammer(most forums hate me or are scared i became a admin)
I can tell u human spammers are better
 
It's not as big as automated spam bots but they can be more annoying as they can get past your anti-spam measures as it is much harder to prevent and stop them from continueing
 
kingcool52 said:
It's not as big as automated spam bots but they can be more annoying as they can get past your anti-spam measures as it is much harder to prevent and stop them from continueing
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What kind of measures have you tried to stop them? Is there any successful method?

When I was running my own forum I never had anything like this. I guess it's true that more "human bots" are appearing due to the innovation of anti-spam tools. They are usually borderline in terms of posting; sometimes good posts, other times bad posts. What I notice is that they like to put weird links on their signature and website link - that kind of "abnormal" links you see in spam bot accounts - so that may be the cue. I guess in that case watching for their posts may not help much?
 
Migi said:
What kind of measures have you tried to stop them? Is there any successful method?

When I was running my own forum I never had anything like this. I guess it's true that more "human bots" are appearing due to the innovation of anti-spam tools. They are usually borderline in terms of posting; sometimes good posts, other times bad posts. What I notice is that they like to put weird links on their signature and website link - that kind of "abnormal" links you see in spam bot accounts - so that may be the cue. I guess in that case watching for their posts may not help much?
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I can't speak for Kingcool, but I would imagine it is hard to implement an effective method of preventing human spammers from signing up. Apart from email verification (which can actually be circumvented with relative ease) the only effective method I can see would be asking a question that to answer would require a certain level of proficiency in English. This would take advantage of the fact that most of these human spammers do not come from English speaking countries, but again this might prevent well-meaning members from signing up.
 
I've never had a human spammer all the ones that I've bad were bots
 
They're SO irritating. Some asshole keeps spamming his crappy weed forum EVERYWHERE, AND he uses a VPN. :verymad:
 
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