How would you define a forum spam? For example, when I am trying to post on other forum with my signature advertising my site, people there will call me spammer (enev though I don't get banned ) This method will allow you to get some little free (and targeted traffic) to your site. The other one is to start a thread advertising the product/service on your site. I personally think this type of marketing is totally unacceptable, but the funny thing is, it will bring you a lot of instant, targeted traffic and some conversion. (I tried it before, 2 posts on 2 forum bring me 500 unique vistors and a pretty decend conversion). 90% of the time you will get you ip banned (you can use proxy, right?) and if you are lucky, you will only get your post "locked". Here is my Question: 1) Is forum spamming illegal? (Is it written in law? I know it is illegal to do email spam, but what about forum spam) 2) Is it worth it? (What is the worst consequence?) 3) Have anyone here tried any forum posting robot? How it works?
1) lol, it isn't written in law, forum spam is completely legit, it just annoys people. The forum may have some terms against it saying that they can ban/charge you but that never happens. 2) Most definetly, if your not getting much traffic from the SEs then it is one of your best sources of targetted traffic. 3) I have a posting robot running 24/7 right now it is only doing comments, but the gist of it is that it will post the same post over and over on every single thread. It is probly very easy to manage and I could script one, wouldn't be very hard, but it's pretty damn unethical. LOL but what's ethics...
Well there is no law but when you subscribe to a forum you are agreeing to the TOS. So the admin will ban you if you violate the TOS.
lol I think we are the same type of person Would you mind sharing more about how those robot works? I am very interested. How do you make comment if you don't even know what the thread is all about?
Yea, but you can have a fake ip and open a new account You feel really bad when someone called you a spammer, that's so sad! (But you are making some money from those people.... Is that what we call a paradox?)
Forum spamming is pretty lame. So if you're really lame, I say "go for it". The trouble is: good forums clean up crap links. That means you'll get links only in complete loser forums. They won't bring traffic, or much juice.
Defining spam is hard, since it comes in many forms. I'd say some of the recent threads giving away free reports come close to spam. Offering something for free, then insisting members PM for the information? I thought for ages about why the PM was important.. then it finally hit me. People send a PM, then post a reply in the thread. The replies make the thread huge, and keep it at the top of the list. Lots of attention = wider distribution for the report. Add to that trying to stop people discussin the content of the report within the thread (increase the mystery factor and arouse interest), and it's almost an opt-in sales page right here within the board! It's a clever idea, but it is (IMHO) abusing the forum to gain traffic to the material. If it were really a gift for the members of the forum - why not just attach it to a post and let people help themselves? (And yes I know I'm doing the same thing - see sig - but if we all started threads offering free bonuses the forum would be unusable) Anyway.. as for the questions: 1) I don't think there are any laws against it, but you'll probably break most forums TOS. 2) Not really. Giving yourself a bad name as a spammer is not worth it for a few hundred visitors. 3) Nope. I've seen what I think is some test posts (gibberish from a new user), but I really don't see the point. If automated forum spamming ever really takes off, a CAPTCHA system will be put in place and it will die - easy as that.
It depend on the terms and conditions written on the forum site. But for my opinion forum spamming is similar to email spamming. The only different is that you can "legitely" spam on a forum site by follow the forum rule properly.
I dont really condone forum spamming as I am not even advertising my site on my signature. All I was offering was a free report I had positive results too!
well...with a bot you can make a macro that rolls through all the different strings, and posts a post that is exactly the same, or a random post from a series of predetermined posts. Either way works.
That is what I want to ask about: Say you are getting (spamming) traffic for your new disposable site (not the main site that bring you steady income) and post tons of affiliate links on it. That way you won't risk lossing your reputation and still make a few bucks from the affiliate program. Is that the reason why there are so many spammers nowdays? (so little work ===> a decent income)
Thanks for your free report. It is very informative to newbie like me Let me know if you have anyother report in the future. I truly think the report iteself worth more than 5 bucks
Well, since I run a forum I'm against it. When I first started getting hit hard by the forum spam bots, Google de-indexed over 200 pages off my forum. Since then, I collect the IP addresses and emails from the spammers. I do some nasty things back to those f*ckers, but I'll leave that under the table.
"Is that the reason why there are so many spammers nowdays? (so little work ===> a decent income)" Yep, but the spammers are the ones that don't have ordinary sites that bring in the majority of their income. If they did, they wouldn't want to risk their reputations.