Spam 101

[caketastydelish]

I for one think 'invasion of the spambots' would make a good book. I'd read it.

 

[shadowplay]

I'll keep an eye out for the web-bugs. There's a browser extension that should be quite effiective for that sort of thing - it spots the "hidden" elements of a webpage and (if configured properly) can prevent them from loading. It's called "Ghostery" and you can find it here.

 

[The_J]

Tried that one, but it slows down the browser massively, and since the urls are not really known, and the smiley are not really hidden, it's not really the right tool for the job.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Tried that one, but it slows down the browser massively, and since the urls are not really known, and the smiley are not really hidden, it's not really the right tool for the job.

So this explains why CFC periodically slows to a crawl.

Bad mods! Bad!

 

[ls612]

Tried that one, but it slows down the browser massively, and since the urls are not really known, and the smiley are not really hidden, it's not really the right tool for the job.

I use Ghostery and it has never slowed my browser down. Granted I do have an i7 processor made last year so that may be part of it but the performance is about the same with and without that addon.

 

[The_J]

Then that might have been just on my computer .
But still, didn't help at all with that problem :/.

 

[NinjaCow64]

Thanks for compiling all this info J!

I was wondering a few things. Is the smily thing something to really worry about, like if they did that could they download viruses to my computer or something? Also, is it more difficult to delete threads that have spam bots in them when someone posts something like "lolspambot" in it? Should people stop doing that?

 

[The_J]

I was wondering a few things. Is the smily thing something to really worry about, like if they did that could they download viruses to my computer or something?

Images can in general also be malicious (last year there was a damn dangerous error found in the .png library, which could lead to a direct infection of your computer by just loading a .png, link), but in the cases we see here it's meant for user tracking, which is only privacy intrusive, but not a general security threat.

Also, is it more difficult to delete threads that have spam bots in them when someone posts something like "lolspambot" in it? Should people stop doing that?

You should report it, that's the only thing which helps.
Posting in a thread can make it more difficult to clean up, since we sometimes just grab all the posts from the search overview and remove them. If there are more posts in a thread, it can lead to leftovers in the forum, with threads without an OP.
That's quite ugly, and is not really helpful, so please don't do it.

 

[ori]

also quoting a spambot makes cleanup exceedingly difficult - since the quotes do not show up in the search