A new wave of spam has emerged, unlike anything I've seen before. Hundreds of ads flood, not just mine, all other platforms daily, packed with irrelevant, nonsensical links in both titles and descriptions. For example: homely.com.au/ulan-new-south-wales/questions/how-to-withdraw-xmr-from-krakenquick-xxxxxxxx robin-helpdesk.zammad.com/help/en-us/1-robinhood/9-how-to-talk-directly-to-xxxxxxxxx vocal.media/authors/how-can-i-get-my-money-back-from-trust-wallet-help-desk-xxxxxxxx The list goes on. It's baffling that the sites above allow these spammers to post such blatant promotional garbage - shame on them for enabling this mess. What's even more perplexing is the spammers' goal. The ads they post are consistently deleted, yet they persist, with real people from one Asian country manually posting hundreds of ads daily. It's not automated. It's a relentless, futile, stupid effort. Knowing their content won't stick, they still churn it out, day after day. What are they hoping to achieve?
They were sold a get-rich-quick scheme and are desperate to prove that they, themselves, weren't conned. They're here too, and platforms that don't use Akismet or some other automated moderation tool are wasting their time. We still double-check them, but at least they're gone before Googlebot and genuine users see them.
When I had my last sites many moons ago, (Proboards and Xenforo) I just banned their global IP's but didn't let it get to me, as my 'guest' numbers went up due to these misfits. That always seemed to help bring in more real traffic somehow.
It’s weird how they keep posting even though the links get deleted fast. Feels like a huge waste of time. What’s the goal here, really?
As a physical store owner, if someone harasses my customers or damages merchandise, I can remove them or call the police to intervene. So why is it acceptable for internet providers or AI companies to bombard a website with thousands of IPs, scraping content and overwhelming servers to a crawl just to feed their AI models? This feels like a digital assault, borderline criminal and it's infuriating that it's allowed.
This is exactly it. The spammers actually have no idea what they are doing or how it could possibly result in revenues, but they have been sold a bill of goods and want to believe so they keep doing what they were told was a surefire way to make money. Back in the late '90's we had discussions like this on listervs and it was the same then: the only people making money off of spamming are those selling spamming gimmicks and tools to the naïve. The issue is that the Internet is still the Wild, Wild, West with basically little to no law enforcement and bad actors all over the world.
The majority of these spam and excessive crawling activities originate from foreign IPs. I've implemented an IP blocker that allows me to block entire IP ranges associated with companies engaging in spam or aggressive crawling. The downside? This can unintentionally block innocent users who share the same internet provider (I can unblock specific IPs upon request if the user contacts me.). In just the past four days, I've had to block an enormous number of IP ranges, it's a clear sign of how rampant and disruptive this issue has become. etc. etc.
On the world wide web what exactly is a "foreign IP"? FWIW I just banned a dude from this foreign IP - the moderation queue had 140 items to work through, with a single ban I cleared the queue!
I was responding to jrbiz, who's in the US like me, so anything outside the US is considered "foreign" I suppose. Good point, though - I'd prefer not to name the specific country, but I will say Trump's tariffs have been causing them serious concern. And no, it’s not Canada.
Your comment about tariffs caused me to wonder if anyone has ever noticed an increase in country-specific spammer activity that may be due to political events? Government-related sites probably do all of the time.
Ever since Trump tarrifed those poor penguins on Heard Island I've been very paranoid about getting tariffed myself. So I plunked down some coin and purchased your Anti Tariff Model tinfoil hat. I am happy to report that it works 100% and I have *NOT* been tariffed!