(27-11-2023, 08:43 AM)notsofast Wrote: Yeah, it's been p*ssing me off recently too - in the last few days I must have logged on 3-4 times solely with the intention of reporting a scammer. I think I must report scammers more often than I make a post in a thread. I'm assuming they get paid per post they make, rather than from 'customer' enquiries? I can't see how they're picking up any custom for the voodoo cures / free money / Thai brides or whatever other criminal crap they're trying to flog. I get sorely tempted to send each scammer a private message telling them to F*** OFF.
They're mostly 'Search optimisers'. The theory being that the mosre sites that links to a site the more important it must be...
And since Google tends to ignore 'link aggregator sites'(pages with hundreds or thousands of links), they instead target forums because Google's robots scan those often. Now, if all links in forums defaulted to adding the 'NoFollow' Meta tag to every posted link, this wouldn't even be an issue. The robots still follow the links, but they no longer count for importance.
In short, spammers doesn't care if their posts gets deleted in a few hours, or no one follows the link. First off, Google has probably already seen it, and secondly, the spammers always ask for payment up front, so they'ver already gotten paid.
I sometimes try to 'follow the money', check out the website in question, and track down their payment processor(they're always selling something). Then I alert whoever that is, and add links to the spammage, and ask if they're ready to handle the influx of complaints and reversed charges... That has had a few successes, but it requires the spam to stay on the site for days.
Another fun trick is that some forum SW has autocorrect...
So that 'a certain pill' name turns into 'sadtosserpillnotworthyofowningaberlingo' in the middle of the link...