I'm a mod on the Hearth.com forums, and I just discovered a new and different form of "link spam" that people had been running on us for a while, thought I'd spread the word on it in case it is being done here as well...
For non-experts, "Link Spam" is an effort by the spammers to raise a sites Google page rank by increasing the number of links to that site from other web pages. While the exact algorithym that Google uses to generate page ranks is secret, links from other sites are a part of it.
What I found by accident is that we had users registering and posting non-spam but "content free" posts, such as "Thank you for the information" or "very interesting thread" and then posting a link inside of color tags that are a match to the background - i.e. [ color=#004040][ url=http://www.spam.com]spamsite[/url][/color] (I chose a color that contrasts, and mistyped the tags on purpose)
This didn't show up when the post is viewed in a thread, other than having your mouse pointer turn into a link pointer if you happen to go over the link, but (at least on hearth.com's software) will show up if you do a search on the right color=<value> as suspect threads. The link also shows up if you quote the message when replying to it - this is how I discovered it initially, as I was going to respond to a poster asking for more info about his problem...
Might be worth looking to see if anyone is trying to pull the same stunt here... (BTW, I would congratulate you on doing a good job of keeping the spam down in general...
Gooserider
For non-experts, "Link Spam" is an effort by the spammers to raise a sites Google page rank by increasing the number of links to that site from other web pages. While the exact algorithym that Google uses to generate page ranks is secret, links from other sites are a part of it.
What I found by accident is that we had users registering and posting non-spam but "content free" posts, such as "Thank you for the information" or "very interesting thread" and then posting a link inside of color tags that are a match to the background - i.e. [ color=#004040][ url=http://www.spam.com]spamsite[/url][/color] (I chose a color that contrasts, and mistyped the tags on purpose)
This didn't show up when the post is viewed in a thread, other than having your mouse pointer turn into a link pointer if you happen to go over the link, but (at least on hearth.com's software) will show up if you do a search on the right color=<value> as suspect threads. The link also shows up if you quote the message when replying to it - this is how I discovered it initially, as I was going to respond to a poster asking for more info about his problem...
Might be worth looking to see if anyone is trying to pull the same stunt here... (BTW, I would congratulate you on doing a good job of keeping the spam down in general...
Gooserider
