It seems that we are being raided by vandals.
Is there anything to do beside mark as spam? Is the SE network doing anything (possibly legal proceedings, if they are applicable) to help and prevent this?
It seems that we are being raided by vandals.
Is there anything to do beside mark as spam? Is the SE network doing anything (possibly legal proceedings, if they are applicable) to help and prevent this?
I'd like to mention another observation although I cannot guess the rationale behind. In the "tetration-forum", which is a usually calm and spam-free much focused discussion-forum, we had an increase of spam-bots (see comments [a] and [b]), which simply copy&pasted questions at other forums and/or introduced themselves with copied introduction-post from elsewhere. In the beginning they also linked to some web-adress and so. But after we began to take measures they suppressed their linking but still registered (anonymous and/or fake real-named) users (many of them were easily detected simply using google for some characteristic expressions in their self-introductionary texts). Concerning the latter, purely registrations without trying to deliver some spam-address, I don't have any clue, for what this could be meaningful for the spammers (maybe simply exercising, or developing the spam-robots or just fun/sportive provocation) .
Just today I saw a question - actually from april this year, but has popped up because of some edits of some serious member of MSE. That was clearly such a spambot-"question" and I added some comment at it, see below for reference. This question has actually many answers and comments, noone (except one, who linked to the source of the text at mathforum.org of the "question") has then been/could have been aware, that this was fake. However, that user has even got some reputation... I didn't check things further, and still have no clue what this is good for at all.
After Yuval's hint to the mathforum I'd like to mention, that the text of the question is 100% identical with that of the mathforum, and the fact that neither its reference was given nor anything about the existing answers there was mentioned I assume
a) this is not a real question, and (see meta)
b) maybe not even a real person asking but possibly an automated transfer of a somehow mathematically sounding text.
A pdf-file with an excerpt of "how to spam a forum using robots" is available at the discussion of this in the tetration-forum as well, see here .
To give an idea for questions like that of Asaf in the comments below I cite one participant with his argument from that transscript (still without really knowing how the real profit works):
(...) Well it worked for me, 100k backlinks in about half an hour. Though ovbiously some get deleted etc so half it and say 50k. Not bad for half an hours work and $450. Plus you get the uniques from people clicking on the links which you are spamming which for me was about 10k+ for about a week.(...)
:p
$\endgroup$ – Willie Wong Oct 7 '11 at 12:06