Quote:
Originally Posted by Seahawk
Honestly, I have the IT skills of Cousin ITT.
Is there a method I could use to that would help?
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My method for identifying a spammer, or spambot, or whatever you want to call the poster -
If their first post bumps a old thread, and included a hyperlink to a site that you maybe think is a bit shady, they may be a bot.
If the suspect has multiple posts on this board, look for a pattern. Take the first post in this thread. There's no hyperlink, so it's maybe just a honest user asking a question. However, if you click Denirooney's name, one of the choices is "find all posts by this user". You'll see a pattern. They will create a post, then wait a few days, and come back later and edit the post and add a hyperlink to a site.
Remember all the bots that scan this site from time to time? They read all the posts and look for hyperlinks. The more times they find the same link to a site, the assumption is that it is a legit site, and when someone searches with google, or bing, or whatever, the more links to the site, the higher the site appears in results.
That's kind of an oversimplification, but that's basically how it works.
Pelican has done their part to block links to some of their competitors. There was a thread earlier this week about blocked links to a Chinese shopping site, there's a block on the site that has all the parts your car could ever need (sing that), and I'm sure there are others. Amazon used to be blocked, eBay doesn't seem to be. They obviously can't block every site, but that's what the little triangle with the exclamation point in the middle is for. If you're pretty sure the link leads to a site that may not be on the up and up, report it. I don't know where it goes from there. I reported the post in the Halloween thread 8 or 9 hours ago, and it's still there. I see the new user with one post in this thread is gone, so someone made a decision on whether to delete it or not.