Back!

[hallsofvallhalla]

Sorry for me not being around to kill the bots. Thanks to the mods for taking care of it. i am uping their permissions so they can ban them as well. i will also fix the registration back.

I was on vacation and they had no internet

[Jackolantern]

Ohh lord, a vacation without internet is no vacation for me (I am such a geek lol).

Thanks for giving him the ban hammer!



We shall wield it with care. Not that we really have any drama around here or anything, which is the leading cause of "hammer-related accidents" lol.

[hallsofvallhalla]

you should no have access to do what you must now. Also added the ability for members to message the admin/mod group.

Thanks!

[Jackolantern]

Hey Halls, am I completely pulling this out of thin air, or did you disable a part of the anti-bot sign-up process? I thought I may have read something about that a few days ago. However, I am not sure though since just 1 bot could be a coincidence, or one of the rare spammers who manually gets their bots into forums.

[hallsofvallhalla]

i did disable the email registration. All we got was one bot?

If so then it may be a fluke like you say. Will see how it goes.

[Jackolantern]

That's what it was! But yeah, just one bot could just be a coincidence. Maybe the bot owner can't make a bot good enough to sign-up and gets them into the forums themselves to do the easy work of writing the spam emails.

[hallsofvallhalla]

i think and I have heard that its a money click thing, a company will hire about 10 employees to go through bot logs and if a fail a registration is in there they manually register. The company makes money off of clicks. 1 person could manually register quite a few sites a day.

[PaxBritannia]

Actually, most of the time they make money off the number of links and the pagerank of the pages with the links.

They get paid by other companies to place 'legitimate links' on forums and such. You also see them sometimes in blog comments etc.

pax.

[Jackolantern]

Yep. I think that making money on the actual links in the forum is a 2nd goal, since they know that the links won't be there long, and really they know that no one is going to click them anyway. Instead their main goal is often to keep bots running 24/7 in the hopes of having a ton of links up in forums, on YouTube, on Facebook, etc. when Google and other search engines sweep these sites for links. "Natural links", or links found on other sites, are a huge boost to SEO, and for sites that sell meds without prescriptions (and other gray-area sites that have millions of competitors), moving up a page on Google can mean millions of dollars in extra revenue.