New spamming method

[jsmorley]

The latest method of spamming we are seeing is a bit more subtle, and we need to watch for it.

The user will make what looks like a real (if pointless and irrelevant) post in a topic. An example is the guy " rosemarie" who posted some questions about how to use Twitter (nothing at all to do with Rainmeter) in "Rainmeter Discussion". If you looked carefully, there were some subltle links in his "signature" which led to commercial products of some kind. There was another guy (possibly even the same guy under another name and IP) posting questions about his "VGA" card with spam in his signature. Same stuff.

We are watching for these guys and deleting the posts and banning the users as we see them. However, it is important, as always, that folks don't "respond" to these posts, as it just makes it harder to clean up.

There is a "report post" button on the bottom right of every post, which will flag the post so moderators will be notified that there is something either objectionable or suspicious about the post. This is all you need to do to flag it. Don't reply with "This post has nothing to do with Rainmeter", as then we just have more cleanup to do, and in fact it makes it MUCH harder to even detect the spam posts. When we scan the list of "new posts", the "last post" for the topic has a user name we know and trust, so it can easily be missed.

1) Watch for irrelevant posts with links in the "signature"
2) DON'T click the links. Spam links can often lead to phishing attacks, malware and who knows what else.
3) Don't respond to the posts, just click the "report" button. We will clean them up and ban the spammer.

[Digi]

thanks alot for the heads up jsmorley mate, i will keep an eye out and most importantly not to respond to such posts....

:thanks:

[maminscris]

and I though the twitter guy have a problem with twitter, thanks for letting us know, I really do not quite look in the signatures

[karmat]

What about those two news posts with the pics the other day, I think one was about the taliban and one was about the grammys? Were they spam too?

[UNleash]

What about those two news posts with the pics the other day, I think one was about the taliban and one was about the grammys? Were they spam too?

Yup.
All of these were spam - linked to some .. mysterious sites in their signature and just copied stuff from any news sites.

[karmat]

Glad I didn't click on anything!

[jsmorley]

These guys are tricky. What I am seeing is that they will often make two or three posts (always irrelevant to Rainmeter) with NOTHING as a signature. No spam, nothing to object to other than the pointless nature of the post. Then once they have what they hope is a "presence" on the board going, nothing to see here, move along, they start using the spam signature.

It's a constant battle that we fight with spammers, hopefully you guys don't see that many of them as the admins here try to catch them and clean up as fast as we can. It is a price we pay for the burgeoning popularity of Rainmeter.

Do use the "Report Post" button if you see something that looks hinky... It's easy to miss some of the more subtle and clever ones and we appreciate the heads up.

[BrianHeston]

I've reported several of these in the past and been very impressed with how quickly the admin team dealt with them. Kudos to the admins!