jacque wrote: ↑Sat Dec 29, 2018 7:02 pm
If it helps, I didn't think you were a troll, the message was too LC specific. But the moderators here have been so overwhelmed with spammers that they've become skeptical by default. Understandable.
Klaus kills more spam here than anyone else, but even the subset I see is indeed nearly overwhelming.
Bots have become much smarter in recent years, creating accounts that gain acceptability by scouring phrases and sentences in use within the target forum community to craft new posts. It may seem like a lot of work, but such scripts are easy to obtain on the black market and once deployed can do reasonably well: if they hit 100,000 forums and are accepted at only 1% of those, that's 1,000 new venues for posting malware links, potentially harvesting thousands of new machines every month to add to their rentable botnets. All it costs the spammer is the bitcoin cost of the script, and a couple bucks in monthly fees for a VPN to mask origin.
All that said, I do like the simple rubric NullSet offered:
How do I prove I am not a spammer? What if I don't spam? Would that prove it?
That's a fair rule, and in a tidy world that would be enough. But you'd be surprised how many posts we see that are quite cleverly assembled. We try to give the benefit of doubt, but if we come across one whose wording happens to match a lot of spam patterns we've seen that day, we may be a little trigger happy. Moderators are no more perfect than the exploitable OSes which are the reason spam exists.
This one worked out, and going forward I'm sure Klaus and I and the other mods will try to pose the question of human authenticity more gently.
