Spam all over the forum

[RapTarX]

I guess all of you have noticed every now and then some off topic posts are there; I noticed them in bitcoin discussion board, reputation board and probably some other boards too. What's the motive behind their posts? The spammer even not posting any link in their post; just some crap texts which I haven't found a reason for posting. Can someone point me what's going on?

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[The Sceptical Chymist]

Can someone point me what's going on?

I couldn't tell you exactly what's going on in these idiots' heads, but there was a spammer a few years ago that would post absolute nonsense around midnight in my time zone, and it went on for a few months.  And like you I was puzzled as to why someone would do that, as there's seemingly nothing to gain from it--so who the hell knows?

I've got Bitcoin Discussion on ignore, so I wouldn't have noticed any increased spam there, but I haven't really seen it in Reputation either.  But if you see spammy shitposts, just report them wherever they are.  The mods will take care of it.

Also, my guess is that people are discovering bitcointalk right now because of the price rise.  That still doesn't explain the spam, but it would account for more shitposts from bounty hunters and the like.

[mk4]

If I remember correctly, I definitely saw links. It’s just that some of those posts has the link sort of hidden one way or another; by adding the URL tag on a “ . “ or something like that.

Basically people who doesn’t know much about SEO and backlinks as far as I know. As if getting backlinks on sites(like Bitcointalk) that aren’t even in their niche(viagra, sports links, etc) helps.

[JeromeTash]

The spammer even not posting any link in their post; just some crap texts which I haven't found a reason for posting. Can someone point me what's going on?

The links are actually there, but they are hidden from direct viewing by inserting them under a letter, a punctuation mark or under other bounty report links. Unless you hover over the letter or punctuation mark. You won't notice it.

[Welsh]

I encountered some old threads being bumped by some brand new - newbie user(or bot?).They are mostly reddit links and it puts me into a dead subreddit with not even a single member. I can't quite remember the content of most of the links, but I believe it was all just a live stream of someone?

I just reported those and I am glad that it was handled almost immediately. I am not sure where they're coming from though.

In this particular case just sounds like someone trying to promote a subreddit they created any way they can. There's usually some motive, or gain to be had from posting this type of spam, and if you can't find the link immediate its likely been obfuscated, and by quoting the post you'll be able to identify the link more accurately.

Its quite common all over the internet for people to post illegally streamed events, since they from it.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

Basically people who doesn’t know much about SEO and backlinks as far as I know. As if getting backlinks on sites(like Bitcointalk) that aren’t even in their niche(viagra, sports links, etc) helps.

This kind of brings me to another question, Don't third party sites that scrap bitcointalks posts like LoyceV's loyce.club and TryNinja's ninjastic.space increase the number of backlinks for those chaps since even archive all the posts even way after they have been deleted here on bitcointalk?

[TryNinja]

Don't third party sites that scrap bitcointalks posts like LoyceV's loyce.club and TryNinja's ninjastic.space increase the number of backlinks for those chaps

I'm no SEO master but I have disallowed all Google robots on my website, so I don't think it helps them with anything.

[NotATether]

Can someone point me what's going on?

I couldn't tell you exactly what's going on in these idiots' heads, but there was a spammer a few years ago that would post absolute nonsense around midnight in my time zone, and it went on for a few months.  And like you I was puzzled as to why someone would do that, as there's seemingly nothing to gain from it--so who the hell knows?

There isn't. These spamposts only get about 5 or maximum 10 views according to bitcointalk's own thread metrics, before a moderator nukes them. At least half of these views are probably from users who report them to moderators. Amateur SEO spammers indeed.

I suggest theymos include the rel="nofollow" tag in all the rendered link HTML to completely void all the benefits of putting SEO spam on bitcointalk. They will no longer be able to bump up the search ranking of a bitcointalk post using their links.

Basically people who doesn’t know much about SEO and backlinks as far as I know. As if getting backlinks on sites(like Bitcointalk) that aren’t even in their niche(viagra, sports links, etc) helps.

This kind of brings me to another question, Don't third party sites that scrap bitcointalks posts like LoyceV's loyce.club and TryNinja's ninjastic.space increase the number of backlinks for those chaps since even archive all the posts even way after they have been deleted here on bitcointalk?

If loyce.club and ninjastic.space don't have a good Google search ranking then this doesn't even matter 

[YOSHIE]

How much you can report, that's what you can do for now.

Yes, I saw they only made a one line topic without explaining what the purpose of their post / topic was, can't prevent them from spamming certain parts of the board, they just keep doing and doing it.
Report the best solutions currently under consideration.

[mk4]

Basically people who doesn’t know much about SEO and backlinks as far as I know. As if getting backlinks on sites(like Bitcointalk) that aren’t even in their niche(viagra, sports links, etc) helps.

This kind of brings me to another question, Don't third party sites that scrap bitcointalks posts like LoyceV's loyce.club and TryNinja's ninjastic.space increase the number of backlinks for those chaps since even archive all the posts even way after they have been deleted here on bitcointalk?

In the case of both of those sites, their domain authority rating is really really low(understandably so because they're too niche), so their SEO effect is pretty much nonexistent.

[TryNinja]

In the case of both of those sites, their domain authority rating is really really low(understandably so because they're too niche), so their SEO effect is pretty much nonexistent.

I had no idea what that was, but I found a website online that apparently calculates those ratings. I really suck at SEO.



Anyways, the answer is probably no. Loyce also has his robots.txt set to "Disallow" on his pages: https://loyce.club/robots.txt

[UserU]

Not sure how those spambots easily bypasses reCAPTCHA.

But loads of malware from the ones I reported, so be careful.

Props to the author(s) that know how to properly name their bots rather than those gibberish usernames

I'm no SEO master but I have disallowed all Google robots on my website, so I don't think it helps them with anything.

Why though? Unless website ranking is not your goal, then it's best to let them crawl.

[mk4]

I had no idea what that was, but I found a website online that apparently calculates those ratings. I really suck at SEO.

https://images.ninjastic.space/waba9/kuxeQuxI38.png/rawhttps://images.ninjastic.space/waba9/paHuteDE33.png/rawhttps://images.ninjastic.space/waba9/LiTokUfa18.png/raw

Anyways, the answer is probably no. Loyce also has his robots.txt set to "Disallow" on his pages: https://loyce.club/robots.txt

Basically your "authority" over the niche(which in this case, is Bitcoin/crypto). And when I say that both your websites are "too niche", it's because not only that your sites only cater to Bitcointalk users, only a small minority of Bitcointalkers are only going to be interested in looking up statistics(using your sites).

But then again, I'm pretty sure both you and LoyceV aren't expecting to rank super high on Google's search results in the first place so it's fine.

[LoyceV]

The 440 thousand backlinks don't surprise me, I create many of those myself, and offering BBCode to post adds a lot of links too. What does surprise me is the 59 linking websites. That must be many automated indexing sites.

I'm no SEO master but I have disallowed all Google robots on my website, so I don't think it helps them with anything.

Why though? Unless website ranking is not your goal, then it's best to let them crawl.

That would be like stealing ranking from Bitcointalk. Theymos asked to add canonical to the source:

Code:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,noarchive,nosnippet" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5303233.msg55927309#msg55927309" />

But bots shouldn't even crawl those:

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /showall/
Disallow: /notifications/
Disallow: /sigcamp/
Disallow: /patrol/

Besides, website ranking was never my goal. I created loyce.club because I couldn't post all my data in 64 kB posts.

Search engines can go wild on amongst others my Trust list viewer (currently 1,283,748 pages), just not the data archived directly from Bitcointalk.
If I search "mocacinno trust list" on Google, this is my first hit. But if someone searches for information on Bitcoin, they shouldn't end up on loyce.club.

[mediaBuzz]

Basically people who doesn’t know much about SEO and backlinks as far as I know. As if getting backlinks on sites(like Bitcointalk) that aren’t even in their niche(viagra, sports links, etc) helps.

Plus, taking into account that we are talking about a forum that gives much less link juice to the destination page. But not everyone is smart enough to work their asses off to analyze SEO trends (knowing a technique that used to work a year ago can not only be totally ineffective but harmful) and work according to them. They prefer to listen to "professional specialists" who say every possible shit to sell their product. Here is the one.

[NotATether]

Not sure how those spambots easily bypasses reCAPTCHA.

But loads of malware from the ones I reported, so be careful.

That's because real people are creating the accounts and passing the captcha, and then they leave one or two posts loaded with either their own links or plagiarism and never come back. Bots that post to SMF forums are currently not as sophisticated as you think and/or are home-grown and not shared by the person who made it, otherwise SMF-automation software on Github would be more trending.

Looks to me more like a deranged troll on the loose than a bot attack.

[UserU]

Looks to me more like a deranged troll on the loose than a bot attack.

If it's a deranged troll, he's working those mods really hard. Churning out new accounts less than 10 seconds after reporting each one, and they're spreading malware which might cause some newbie to download without checking out the username involved.

That would be like stealing ranking from Bitcointalk. Theymos asked to add canonical to the source (https://loyce.club/archive/posts/5592/55927309.html):

Fair point.

[nbminer]

I'm pretty new here myself, but already getting fed up with the amount of spam.

I think the mods should consider stopping creation of new accounts for a while.

[malevolent]

It's being dealt with but there has been a sudden increase in spam in the past few days. By the type of spam that shows up it's easy to tell there's more than one actor wasting their time. I wouldn't be surprised if it hurts them more than helps them since I'd expect Google to penalize sites which are spammed like that (off-topic content with links quickly disappearing).

[Poker Player]

I'm pretty new here myself, but already getting fed up with the amount of spam.

I think the mods should consider stopping creation of new accounts for a while.

That would temporarily stop new spam-bot accounts being created and then what? When new accounts were allowed again we would have the same problem. Even more if they are bots. I reported a bunch of them, in some cases I'm not sure if they are stupid people or bots.

[stompix]

I've got Bitcoin Discussion on ignore, so I wouldn't have noticed any increased spam there, but I haven't really seen it in Reputation either.

It's all over the forum,I saw this topic in goods, created in 2018 with only one post:
Land For Sale - Budapest, Hungary (8 BTC)
pop up in the recent activity 3 times in the last days, when I opened it, nothing, but according to Loyce's archive there have been 22 pots deleted from that single topic alone.

I checked a few and they all seem to lead to a few free sports streaming services but I'm not curious enough to see what's really behind those links.
I wonder if they are indeed only about SEO score or just spamming the hell to get a few victims, those sites have a low life expectancy and google will soon penalize them so, what's the point?

[Poker Player]

I don't know if the attack speed of the bots has accelerated but there have been three commenting in a short period of time in the WO thread (already reported and dealt with). Then if we see the threads opened in meta I would say so because people are busy reporting:

Posting/reporting limits

Spam and plagiarism

Please block the user @taatacycsa.