Massive Attacks of Spam
 

Several hundred cluttering up the site this morning. They're now showing up across many different subforums.

I regularly look at two other forums: TalkBass.com and TheGearPage.com. I can't remember ever seeing a single spam message on either. Maybe that's because they use newer host software, and maybe the Bike Forums software is too old to incorporate adequate protection. I hope not. The site is all but unusable today.

Becoming an out-of-control situation

Yeah. I have reported a bunch. Even hit the charitable events subforum.

Skynet is becoming self-aware.

What I don't get is that the forum software won't let us use certain banned words, but these guys have been posting basically the same spam a gazillion times. Time to update the banned words list? I think we can survive without "Abu Dhabi" and, you know, the other one.

I'm just thankful I'm not paying for a premium membership and seeing that stuff. I will admit, though, that I'm starting to have reservations about getting on the BF now. Hopefully something can be done soon.

Unless you open a spam thread link, you have nothing to worry about.

I've only seen this crap on BF.

It becomes an impossible task for the moderators & admins, because most anyone can join BF.
Just an e-mail and answering a few questions, while completing a profile.
The only way around the spam would require original posts to go thru an approval process.
That could make it very difficult to implement, since it would mean constant vetting by the mods.

As I said in my opening post, I never see any spam attacks on the other forums I visit. Why here?

IMO, the mods/admin here do a pretty good job cleaning things up pretty quickly.

I reported a bunch too. Never a problem until yesterday

We are the largest English speaking bike forum on the web.

I'm a mod on another forum and they get hit with spam like we've seen here. It's an endless game of whack-a-mole, once you block an IP, they use another one.

I'm a paying member here because I understand that it takes resources and money to keep a forum going. That doesn't guarantee 100% against the spam attack that we just saw, just that there will be resources to clean it up and measures to thwart future attacks.

I'm a member of quite a few large English speaking forums, but I've never seen this on any of them. I mean no offense, but that doesn't seem like a valid reason.

That makes sense.

Potential clientele

This post got me curious so I checked out some other English speaking bike website forums. The very first one I went to had more members than BF. BF claims 484,854 members whereas the other site claims just under 511,000 members. Interesting to say the least.

I've definitely seen attacks like this on MTBR and other similar old fashioned forums.

I don't think any bbcode type forums have as much traffic as they did 10-15 years ago. It's not competitive with the three or four generations of social media since. If it were there would be a lot more advertising from bike companies here. What's really great here is the long running core community and the enormous archive of help, but it won't be here if it stops making money for ib

I have to believe the reason we see spam here is that BF is one of the highest trafficked sites. I've seen several other forums with high traffic count rendered useless by the SPAM attacks. And during those times, I never saw any SPAM on sites that only get a 1000 or so posts a day. Spammers know that getting their message out to the masses is important. So spamming the high traffic sites gives them a chance to possibly snare a few customers in the brief time their posts are out there. On a less trafficked site, they'd be wasting their valuable time as the post would be taken down before the few people that might be interested in them will see them.

So IMO, considering the volunteer services of the moderators are used to fight the SPAM, they do a good job. There is no fool proof stuff that can be done programmatically that can be done without affecting those that would get outraged if their posts are caught and wrongly flagged as SPAM. Just like new encryption methods eventually get hacked, program code to fight SPAM eventually gets defeated too.

I can't see the relationship made to SPAM and not wanting to pay the small pittance BF charges for a paid subscription to get rid of ads. Ads are always more annoying than SPAM which gets cleaned up quick.

My ad blocker blocks all ads on all sites. All they are, are gray areas on the screen.

But ad blockers deny the website revenue that the creators and maintainers of it deserve. It cost quite a bit of money to have the machinery and network infrastructure to run a site like this and then pay those that have to earn wages. This isn't something that can be run on a single $3000 PC or $4000 macbook pro.

Or get a paid membership and help directly support the site.

We’re not talking about ads. We’re talking about bots that start dozens of thread for call girls, many from Dubai. Check the forums early enough and you might see them. There were probably a dozen in General alone and more in other forums.

Early this morning, there were close to a hundred (page after page on my laptop screen, with an occasional legit thread sprinkled among them), across a half-dozen subforums.

I highly recommend reading all the posts before you share your opinion.

You're rather new around these parts..perhaps you might consider you're own advice

Professing ourselves to be wise, we're becoming fools.