Thanks to the Forum Admins...

[fl]

..., for dealing so quickly with that massive spam bomb we got hit with this morning. It's nice to come back a few hours later to find all the junk cleaned out.

[fl]

..., although I see the problem is ongoing...

[Paulo M]

And keeps going....I hate the people that do this. Bunch of retards...

[Perfect Record]

Does anyone know why people are putting up just jumbles of words as posts? What's the point? I must be missing something.

[fl]

I think the objective is malicious - to overload servers and crash systems. The "word-salad" is just random content to increase the volume of information, contributing to the overload. The spam storm we experienced here in this forum a couple of weeks ago is just a small sampling of the kind of stuff that is constantly being floated about on to the 'net, yet as individuals, we don't see a lot of it due to the diligence of system admins, moderators, subscription checkers, spam filters and your ISP's security arrangements.

It seems that even today (Dec. 2) we're still getting hit. Somehow these automated processes are getting past the sign-up requirements to join our forum, after which they bombard us with all this junk. I think it's best to just wait for the moderators to clear it all out, and to not open any of these messages - certainly do not reply!

[Perfect Record]

Frank,

I think it's something more subtile than that. The amount of data in any one of those posts pales compared to even the smallest Youtube video, so I don't know that there is much chance of overload. The 2 posts I opened had a link in them, which I wasn't inclined to open.

I used to get a lot of those random word messages as email when I worked at Sonic. I think I'm missing something here, but I'm really curious.

[fl]

Well, I suppose if a person is willing to blanket the universe with spam, they just might be able to realize a profit from the number of people willing to click on an unknown link. Law of percentages.

[Perfect Record]

I'm wondering if their intention was to place so many searchable (Googleable) terms in as many posts as possible to just hoping to get some poor victims to click on the post?

That doesn't explain why I used to get so many emails with a sea of random words.

[fl]

I'm wondering if their intention was to place so many searchable (Googleable) terms in as many posts as possible to just hoping to get some poor victims to click on the post?

You may be onto something here. There is a Google function that sees how many external links there area in the world that point to a specific website. The more there are, the higher ranking that website gets so it appears earlier in the list of responses you get to a Google search. Perhaps having a bunch of links from a bunch of forum posts on a website is what they're after.

I'm still waiting for my six million dollars from Nigeria...

[J.Wajer]

I'm still waiting for my six million dollars from Nigeria...

Lol! Who isn't? Spambots are everywhere. I run a couple of fora, and even if you make waterproof captcha's (my son designed a cat-dog-dog authorisation system with three pictures; choose between cat or dog. Easy for human, nogo for bot) then they will still manually register and spam advertisements. But usually it is a 100% lorum ipsum automated process.

[Perfect Record]

I'm still waiting for my six million dollars from Nigeria...

Frank,
I just heard from him yesterday. He's still waiting for you to send him your bank account number so he can make the deposit. I'm sure this will all be taken care of.