I noticed the spam posted by adibarmi and I see now that it's been deleted. I'm curious. Was the spam discovered by a bot (and I don't mean forwardslash), or discovered by a human. I thought of alerting the powers that be about the spam, but realized that it was posted on a hubski feed so they were likely to see it anyway. Do people realize that when a comment says "This comment has been deleted" - that it is probably spam? I didn't until now.
In this case, it was a manual removal by the Hubski team because our auto-detection methods for comments is not the same as posts. We let the community handle all post spam. Besides the fact that we would prefer to do no moderation at all, it's a major hassle for us remove them. It's not like I have a delete button by all the posts and comments—my hubski looks exactly like yours. We really only remove comment spam when it literally cannot be construed as anything but spam. The ones I have removed previously have all been done by bots with HTML markup in them, advertising Canadian pharmacies, etc. cc: thenewgreen mk
Weirdly, I was alerted to it when the spammer became a follower of #writebetterdammit.lil the only dot lil follower of writebetterdammit. Actually adibarmi is following all the writebetterdammit personal tags and a few domains. Weird. So I checked to see who was following that tag and discovered all the spam. At least spammers want their spam properly written.
That is hysterical. I read an article a while back that spam is more successfully when it is poorly written because it weens out all the people who would be too intelligent to fall for the spam down the line and prevents the spammers from wasting time. It's the same concept as having a high barrier of entry, but only for low people. >.<
Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria? From the abstract:Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.
Yes, I had to tackle adibarmi. I was putting some drip line in our garden this morning, and so was a bit slow on the draw. I don't have a problem putting the smack down on blocks of html about sports watches. If it has nothing to do with the post, see ya later.