a glut of silent spam
Two years ago, I started working on a web site. I installed an online forum. Anyway the site never really went live. More recently, as I've been working on the SFContario web site, I turned on web statistics. And I discovered a lot of traffic on the site that had never been publicized.
Seems like Google or something found it. So spammers found an unmoderated forum. And they posted spam. Lots of it. To each other, as there were no real users.
This forum had a couple of thousand registered users and almost 200,000 messages. Good thing hosting is cheap, eh? I'm just idly curious if any of the spammers bought each others' products or services? It was really bizarre seeing so many people putting so much effort into logging in and posting their stuff on a forum that no one was reading.
Anyway I deleted it all this week. If I ever need this, I can recreate it. Moral of the story is if you're going to have an online community, someone should moderate it. So I'm being careful to log into http://blog.sfcontario.ca and http://committee.sfcontario.ca, just to be on the safe side. (The first is WordPress and has some built-in anti-spam functionality and the second requires users to be approved before they can do anything, so not much to worry about.) I'm also checking our Facebook group regularly, and the Google Groups list comes into my regular inbox.
Seems like Google or something found it. So spammers found an unmoderated forum. And they posted spam. Lots of it. To each other, as there were no real users.
This forum had a couple of thousand registered users and almost 200,000 messages. Good thing hosting is cheap, eh? I'm just idly curious if any of the spammers bought each others' products or services? It was really bizarre seeing so many people putting so much effort into logging in and posting their stuff on a forum that no one was reading.
Anyway I deleted it all this week. If I ever need this, I can recreate it. Moral of the story is if you're going to have an online community, someone should moderate it. So I'm being careful to log into http://blog.sfcontario.ca and http://committee.sfcontario.ca, just to be on the safe side. (The first is WordPress and has some built-in anti-spam functionality and the second requires users to be approved before they can do anything, so not much to worry about.) I'm also checking our Facebook group regularly, and the Google Groups list comes into my regular inbox.