why all the pharmaceutical related new wix members???
Tue Dec 05, 2006 10:09 pm
i've pm'd scott on this a number of times........ these lame ass losers who post new wix memberships & then post prescription drug websites, most namely male oriented ones who are aimed at those who don't know what a stiffy is anymore. i find these time wasters tedious, aggravating & juvenile. scott is doing his best to weed them out, but i wish they'd stop polluting a great site, & wasting everybody's time, namely scott's!!! scott sorry if i overstepped my bounds, but this subject had to be brooched to the group. i always look at who are new additions to the group, & then these ridiculous profiles come to light. get a life time wasters!!
Wed Dec 06, 2006 9:10 am
They're not "members" or even actual people. They're spam bots, automated programs that scour the web looking for PHP based forums (like this) that meet certain criteria, such as easy registration. Once they find a suitable forum, a series of scripts runs that begin creating accounts and posting spam. In their own way, they are clever little programs. A royal pain in the tushy, but still clever.
Bots like the ones you've seen are the season that many sites now require you to type in a word that is displayed in an image before registering or posting. "Captcha's" are a way of adding a layer of security that ensures (or tries to ensure) that there is an actual person sitting at a computer looking at the page.
The downside to captchas is that the bigger spammers are now paying offshore companies to have people spend ten hours a day figuring entering the answer to captchas into a database (for about a buck a day) so that the scripts can take the image a verification page shows and create a mathematical "hash" of that image, then compare it to the database of known answers, and try registering using the answer it gets. The labor cost is cheap enough so that the spammers can still make money, since the advertising end of their business is essentially free.
Isn't the internet a wonderful place?
Bots like the ones you've seen are the season that many sites now require you to type in a word that is displayed in an image before registering or posting. "Captcha's" are a way of adding a layer of security that ensures (or tries to ensure) that there is an actual person sitting at a computer looking at the page.
The downside to captchas is that the bigger spammers are now paying offshore companies to have people spend ten hours a day figuring entering the answer to captchas into a database (for about a buck a day) so that the scripts can take the image a verification page shows and create a mathematical "hash" of that image, then compare it to the database of known answers, and try registering using the answer it gets. The labor cost is cheap enough so that the spammers can still make money, since the advertising end of their business is essentially free.
Isn't the internet a wonderful place?
Wed Dec 06, 2006 12:08 pm
What Phil says is absolutely true. It's the main reason that I have been forced to manually authorize new members. I have to go into the profile and figure out if it's a spam bot. On the good side they tend to fill in stupid answers for the profile and are easily spotted. This is because alot of sites require a minimum number of profile catagories to be filled. Something I think I will have to employ. The hard part is those bots that don't fill out anything. This is difficult because a large number of new applicants don't fill out anything and I am sure I have denied accounts to legitimate enthusiasts but have no way to tell. Roughly 90% of the applicants are spambots. Takes 20-30 minutes a day to go through them all and thats time I'd rather use working on the site.