Homestar Runner Wiki Forum

I think that the mods/admins are doing a good job taking care of the spam-bots and whatnot, though it seems they've been especially busy lately. However, I would like to recommend one more thing.

We really ought to be either completely deleting the posts the bots leave, or we should be getting rid of all of their links. Locking the posts and moving them to the Spam Vault is good, but the reason the bots leave all the links is for Google, not the users. All those links boost the pagerank for the linked-to sites, so if you don't get rid of the links, it's still a win for the spammers.

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Well, we do try to delete them, but it makes it a lot easier when people don't post in thise spam topics. And unfortunately, only the admins can delete the users, and they're not on as much as the rest of us are.

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I'm talking about the links within their posts.

http://forum.hrwiki.org/viewtopic.php?p=463681#463681 is a good example of this. There are still dozens of clickable actual links. I doubt any forumers would click on them, but as long as these links are displayed, Google is boosting their pagerank, and that's the only reason that the bots are posting these links.

I'm just asking that when a bot makes a topic, to go and replace all their text with: {links removed by so-and-so}

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It's a good idea, but personally, I see absolutely no need to leave the post in existence. Usually, if a spambot posts in a section of the board that I moderate, I get their IP address and user name, then nuke the entire thread, with their posts and the posts that everyone makes even though we've asked the to not post in spam threads.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.

That's a good way to do it. As long as their links aren't active anymore, whether it was done by nuking the thread or by redacting all the links, whatever.

I had just noticed a number of cases in the Spam Vault where that hadn't happened, and I wanted to bring attention to that.

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Yeah, we do go through the Memberlist on a more-or-less daily basis, checking for new bots with baaaad websites on their profiles. And I must say we're pretty good at grabbing them pretty quickly. At least the ones with baaaaaaad sites. Anyhow, keep on tranglin', MC, and we'll see what the admins think of implementing something like that.

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Before you do that, you might want to ask Stu, Tom, It's Dot Com, or JoeyDay if they'd actually use it.
It'd be a shame to see you work on something that we're not going to use.

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If you can't fix it with a hammer, you have an electrical problem.