Forest
Beloved Grand Eagle
Hi folks,
I'd like to thank @Tennis Tom for identifying what appears to be a spammer in another thread. I've moved the original post and Tom's reply here to help people develop an idea of what spam looks like.
The post had a suspicious link to Shouldice hospital, which I guess does hernia repair.
Links are a valuable currency on the internet because search engines such as Google consider a link to a site to be an endorsement of the site. For a firm, the more links there are to a site, the more people Google will send them and the more money they will make. Therefore, ambitious relatively small firms pay "black hat SEOs" from developing nations to find forums such as ours to spam with links to their site. To protect our forum, we take an active approach to spam, letting the spammers know that spam is not tolerated on our site.
Typically, the black hat SEOs are located in developing countries with decent technical infrastructures and some English ability. Over the years, you get good at identifying spam posts. Tennis Tom could identify the spam immediately and clicked the "Report" link to draw my attention to the post. I investigated and have removed the offending links.
(There is a report link below every post, and I encourage people to use it when they suspect spam or some other violation of our policies. I am tremendously busy behind the scenes and this is a free forum, so I won't get involved unless a post interferes with the proper running of our forum. We have a great group here, so I almost never have to do anything, but for small, well run forums like this one, spam, personal attacks, and "drama" are the behaviors most likely to lead to moderator or admin involvement.)
Thanks for catching the post, Tom. I take way too much pride in this forum to allow spam to pollute it.
I'd like to thank @Tennis Tom for identifying what appears to be a spammer in another thread. I've moved the original post and Tom's reply here to help people develop an idea of what spam looks like.
The post had a suspicious link to Shouldice hospital, which I guess does hernia repair.
Links are a valuable currency on the internet because search engines such as Google consider a link to a site to be an endorsement of the site. For a firm, the more links there are to a site, the more people Google will send them and the more money they will make. Therefore, ambitious relatively small firms pay "black hat SEOs" from developing nations to find forums such as ours to spam with links to their site. To protect our forum, we take an active approach to spam, letting the spammers know that spam is not tolerated on our site.
Typically, the black hat SEOs are located in developing countries with decent technical infrastructures and some English ability. Over the years, you get good at identifying spam posts. Tennis Tom could identify the spam immediately and clicked the "Report" link to draw my attention to the post. I investigated and have removed the offending links.
(There is a report link below every post, and I encourage people to use it when they suspect spam or some other violation of our policies. I am tremendously busy behind the scenes and this is a free forum, so I won't get involved unless a post interferes with the proper running of our forum. We have a great group here, so I almost never have to do anything, but for small, well run forums like this one, spam, personal attacks, and "drama" are the behaviors most likely to lead to moderator or admin involvement.)
Thanks for catching the post, Tom. I take way too much pride in this forum to allow spam to pollute it.
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