WARNING - Spam bots cookie stuffing WSOs, watch out for fake smileys - Something needs to be done

They don't acknowledge my reports. I reported it first thing this morning, and 3-4 times since then. I also replied to Thomas via the support desk.

That smiley is STILL on my thread.

I'm honestly not promoting my WSOs anymore because of this. It happens every single time I bump one. Still the admins have not set up a simple spam blocker like, don't allow members with no posts to include images in replies to WSOs.

I'm starting to see why more and more vendors are moving away from the forum and using new venues.

http://www.warriorforum.com/off-topi...ml#post9521585

specifically:

"I think it is Seasoned that mentions sites being black listed (and blocked) due to various security issues...

I can remember a day not long ago - not sure if it was post Allen Says or not, but I could not access the forum, because Google had a problem with some link that was somewhere in the forum (note 1 link out of ~2000000). There was a page that blocked the forum display from my view and I could not navigate past 'the block'.

...at the time i felt it was draconian and fascist to prevent all the people with WSO's etc (business transactions) running through the forum, (actually they effectively shut down those businesses for several hours); but the Helpdesk did respond right away when notified, to remove the malware link."

Thanks Paul.

Wouldn't disabling images for new members solve this problem?

I run a pretty big forum as well (It's a niche forum, non-IM), and placing simple restrictions for whatever usergroup brand new members are put into upon registration should solve this particular problem almost instantly.

My forum is set up so members are moved into a standard user group once they have made a couple posts on the forum and have been registered for at least 2 days, and until they make it to this new usergroup they cannot do things like post links or images.

This would be especially effective, even if you guys placed these limits ONLY on the WSO/classifieds sections for new members (or members with few or no posts)

Most of these spam accounts have 0 posts, or at most 1 or 2 so a simple limitation would at the very least, do a great deal of good for the forum.

@Joseph

There are a few reasons for not wanting to sell WSOs anymore, and stick to my outside promotion.

1 - The main one being that no affiliate is going to promote a product where the page is consistently spammed by cookie stuffers that can steal commissions. (I don't know if it's the case here specifically, but it is possible).

2 - Conversion rates take a serious dive. Maybe it's a psychology thing, I don't know, but conversion rates take a real dive the moment one of these spammers makes their post. Especially if it's a thread without several pages of replies and/or the most recent post is one of these ugly spammers.

This particular type of spammer copies/pastes content from previous posts in the thread, usually a question, so the post does sometimes look very legitimate.

9 times out of 10 the copied/pasted content by the spammer is a QUESTION, so not only do you have a big ugly post in your thread to throw off the flow of your sales message (which here, includes the replies in a thread), but it also will appear as an unanswered question.

I never respond to the spam, I just report them. When it takes the mods 8+ hours to delete these posts (no offense, I know you guys are busy, but this is a serious headache), well you can do the math from there and see why I'm frustrated and don't want to promote WSOs anymore.

There should be preventative measures in place to cut back on this problem. My suggestion would be like I said, simply disallow new/shallow members from posting images on WSO's.

If you pay to bump a thread and your conversion rates are immediately knocked by these spamming cookie stuffers, and not addressed for hours, you're simply losing money and that's the bottom line.

Paul, I actually think that it's a great Idea as I find myself reporting spam posts quite a lot these days. Having a restriction on images and links until maybe 10 posts should not effect the rest of the members at all. It actually will do the forum some good.

As far as the impact on legitimate members, generally they will make it past the initial usergroup pretty quickly, so it's not too big of a deal in my opinion (assuming you rolled out this fix or similar globally across the entire forum).

Also generally any restrictions placed come with an error message as well, and there are many mods/plugins to accomplish this over at the vbulletin.org mods section.

So even if legitimate members tried to post an image after having just registered, they would see a message like "Sorry, you need a few more posts on the forum before you can post images" so there shouldn't be too many support requests in regards to the limitation. Most people understand why things like this are put in place, especially in an internet marketing forum I'm sure most everyone knows what spam is and how it works on the bot/automation level.

It shouldn't be too difficult to limit restrictions to only the WSO section either, as each forum has its own set of permissions for each individual usergroup.

The WSO section is directly related to MONEY, sales/customers/affiliates etc. Many of us, including myself, like to advertise here daily so this in my opinion should take priority over the rest of the forum anyway. Even if the limitation was applied globally, it is worth it to make the adjustment if you consider the pros and cons. (in my opinion)

I've got a PM conversion going with Alaistair now, I'll see if we can help each other out and figure out a solution where everyone wins.

My idea is that external images in posts could only be hosted on several known image-hosting services.

This way a user won't be able to just include an image hosted wherever he wants (for cookie stuffing).

Using the links to the images of services like imageshack.com ensures that the image / the site hosting it, is legit.

Unfortunately with vbulletin there is no way to prioritize reports without some kind of modification to the core files.

However, there is a slight work-around for this also.

By default, vbulletin can create a new thread in a designated forum each time a report is submitted, and also send an email to assigned moderators of that forum.

The problem is the designated thread, and email addresses for the assigned moderators is a global setting, not an individual forum setting.

The fix would be to designate a dumby account (or a monitored account, whichever) to the WSO section and give that account a specific email address. So every time a report is made in a WSO thread, the email address attached to the dumby account will be notified of reports in the WSO section ONLY.

This acts as a work-around because now rather than prioritizing reports, at least you can organize them by segmenting forum specific reports to that specific email address which can be monitored by all WSO moderators or forwarded to their email addresses for the purpose of telling them apart.

It's not a perfect solution but at least you'll know which reports are from the WSO forum without having to sift through the dozens or hundreds (who knows) that come in from all over the forum on any given day or hour.

@sbucciarel

It's more of a conversion rate thing, especially for new or single page threads where the conversation and replies in the thread have a very significant impact on conversion rates. It can abruptly change the flow of the sales message and the thought behavior of the prospect.

A nice headline can make a big difference, and so can a big fat attention grabbing "post contains images" yellow box attached to the post of a spammer on your sales thread.

Although sales in themselves cannot be lost, cookie stuffing can be used by spammers to cookie thread viewers to credit the spammer as an affiliate on the sales(s). This is generally only a problem for vendors who "auto approve" all affiliates, but regardless cookie stuffing is a problem and shouldn't be underestimated.

Yep, have to watch those evil smileys!

They pop up everywhere!


Best to make your own?


But maybe not these ones?

The Malware notice is brand new. Just started today or last night. Cookie stuffers have been here for as long as the forum has been open. Do you actually think a forum admin can stop cookie stuffing any more than they can stop spam. Having member moderators report it as they see it is the best defense, but most of the sellers don't seem to know what a cookie stuffer is or just are too lazy to use the report button.