The Essence Of Spam

[Winfried]

I started this topic out of frustration and amazement about the amount of spam overhere. I know it is hard to block these guys, so don't think it's critic towards the moderators (only one I know is Tom, are there anymore?). It's more of a "why-" kind of thing. I'd really like to know why people place the most annoying of adverts on fora, time after time after time (a lot of times). Is it a quick cash-in? After all, subscribing to a forum is free, and so is posting on them. Or is it more of a mass attack? By this I mean throwing so much adverts at people, so that they have to see at least some of them. A bit like the e-mail spamming. And why is it the adverting companies believe this approach works? All I think when I see another thread/e-mail named "Experience The Feeling Of Youth Again" or "Cheap mortgages" is "oh no, not again" and not the "just what I need" reaction the advertisers expect us to have. After a click on the delete-button, or the '<< Back to philosophy' link, the only thoughts left are "why" and "what do they expect to achieve with this". You guys seem like a good bunch of psychologists, so please tell me: Why do people place such a large amount of spiced ham on others? What is the meaning of this gibberish?

[WanderingTaoist]

Profit-Motive. Or greed, to put it more bluntly.

The companies that use spam are trying to expand their reach, hoping they'll find gullible consumers.

If the actual posters are human, they're getting paid to sign up for forums and post advertisements.

If they're programs or robots, then they are doing the bidding of humans who are getting paid to post advertisements.

[Thomas Knierim]

Winfried: All I think when I see another thread/e-mail named "Experience The Feeling Of Youth Again" or "Cheap mortgages" is "oh no, not again"

Yes, I think the same. The amount of spam has dramatically risen during the last six weeks. You probably only see a fraction of it, because I delete spam three times daily from the board. There are three to five messages every day. It's becoming a maintenance problem.

What concerns the motivation of the spammers, it is quite simple: to increase their presence on the Internet. Of the thousands of boards they spam, some of them may be unattended, others boards are so busy that their messages might slip through, remain on the forum, possibly get indexed by a search engine, or get clicked by naive users. It's really prybar marketing. Needless to say that it's highly annoying.

Yet, I have a plan.

The Help Desk forum which was previously open to unregistered users is already closed off. In a few days I will move this board to a new URL to thwart the bots. I will analyse the traffic to see how many of them are human vs. bots. I think we will be able to tell from the adaptation rate. Next, I might disable automated registrations and switch to a manual approval procedure. Finally, if it turns out that the board software is vulnerable, I will upgrade the system. Since this costs money and many hours of work, it will be the last option, however.

Cheers, Thomas

[Thomas Knierim]

Lo and behold! Seven days have passed since I moved the discussion board to a new URL and we haven't got a single spam message since then.

I guess it's safe to say that 99% of the spam that reaches TBV is bot-operated.

Cheers, Thomas

[schrodinger]

Nice work, Thomas. Thanks for all you do around here.

[Winfried]

Wonderful news!
Now it just leaves my question to be answered: Why would anyone bother bothering others this much?

[Thomas Knierim]

Well, I basically did myself a favour since I don't need to clean up the forums twice daily anymore.

Winfried: Now it just leaves my question to be answered: Why would anyone bother bothering others this much?

From a game theoretical point of view it is a perfect example of non-cooperative behaviour in a largely cooperative environment. We find the same phenomenon in biology, where it is called "parasitic" behaviour. Isn't it interesting how life in cyberspace resembles biological life?

Cheers, Thomas

[Elizabeth Isabelle]

Companies would not continue to advertise in any manner unless it was cost-effective. Researchers have done studies showing that the most effective method of advertising is word-of-mouth, then they expanded on that to get people to go on internet message boards, socialize a bit, and pitch the product - also to go into clubs and bars and do the same thing.

Obviously bots are cheaper than humans, and there have been plenty of studies on telemarketing showing that although recordings get a higher percentage of hang-ups than humans, recordings can reach a higher number of people, making the raw number of positive responses greater than what can be achieved through humans, and at a lower cost.

I understand it's no big deal to put a tracer on a link, so I'm sure they have enough data to show effectiveness of their advertising methods. It annoys most people, and I doubt that people from a philosophy forum would click such links, but bots neither know nor care what kind of a forum they are posting on and just hit enough of any kind of site to get some showing of traffic into their business.

[WanderingTaoist]

*ahem*...Thomas?

They're baaaaack!