I set up my disabled access travel blog on Thursday afternoon. It took less than 48 hours for the first spammer to post on it. Disappointingly the stats show that the spammer came to my blog via zoochat...
Spammers will use any means possible to find social media sites. A sad reality of the internet age. We do try to shut down new spam accounts on this site as soon as they appear, but I am afraid there is no way to keep spammers from looking at this site (unless we make it a non-public site, which is not a good solution IMO).
As a followup, the moderators cannot see every new post all the time. For this reason I would encourage all members to click "report" on any post or thread you feel is spam.
The spammer probably doesn't realise I can see where they posted from (Phoenix, Arizona) and that their ip is now registered with several spam databases.
What exactly is a spammer? Is it to do with advertising some service or product. And what do robots do? It lists 296 robots on this site just now.
Spammer - noun - a person or organization that sends irrelevant or unsolicited messages over the Internet, typically to large numbers of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.
Lots of people on here will know this already, because of the great amount of nerditity present, but the term spam as used in email comes from Monty Python. Specifically, this sketch:
The spam never got published, I have my blog set so that the first time someone posts a comment I have to check it because I also have a Facebook page for my railway photography and I've sort of abandoned that since January because people from West Africa keep posting messages from God on it.
In the stats there is a section for referrers, where the person linked to my site from. Here you can see than most came from Facebook, a few from Zoochat and one from a search engine: There are three dots ... after zoochat, clicking on them shows that zoochat included spam: I received several more spams overnight, all showing as zoochat, I will have to remove the link from my profile.
After removing the link from my profile the spamming stopped for 48 hours, but has now started coming from other places. Here is a free tip for spammers, when a website is less than a week old don't claim you have been reading it for years...
