Saturday 3 March 2007

Pic of the day: Endlösung der Spammerplage, as seen by cranky forum administrator.

Meta: Forum spam

There is not much activity on the forum, nor has there ever been. This is probably because most people just come to the Chaos Node for the pictures, actually. The text is rarely for the masses, except when I write about games. Otherwise it is all about me (hardly for the masses) or about things that most people fail to take an interest in. (Their loss, of course.)

And so it came to pass that 99 out of 100 registered users on my forum were trying to sell car insurance, shoddy loans and drugs. In the past I have satisfied myself with just removing their posts after a few minutes (I get a mail directly to my inbox when someone registers with a false email address, which you would definitely want to do if you post spam that could land you in jail for a while. Selling prescription drugs without prescription should qualify in most civilized nations. More abour that shortly.)

But then one day I happened to log on while the googlebots were there, hard at work. I realized that they also trawled the member list, and dutifully recorded the homepages of all the registered users. These homepages are almost without exception spam blogs elsewhere... there are sometimes several layers of this, spread like the tributaries of a river, gathering traffic from as many places as possible to get as high a pagerank at Google as possible. This explain why I have hundreds of dodgy users registered who never posted. If they post, they call attention to themselves and risk being banned. (I have banned a lot of IP addresses over these months.) But by quietly sitting there, they get a small but reliable trickle of Google attention.

Naturally I set forth and deleted the most recent, since these are probably still active. (Due to fear of the police, most such sites are short-lived. Not to mention fear of various other people who would feel justified to do unspeakable things to their rectum with oddly shaped objects if only we could catch them alive or recently dead.) I made a couple small macros in AutoHotKey to help me with the tedious repetitive key presses, and set about rooting out the obvious spammers. Not that there were many obvious non-spammers. My Sims computer was running a single-person household anyway, so did not require much attention.

But after a while I began to think. That's just the way some of us are! And I thought, what does this junk do when it's not deleted? Well, it clogs up Google with useless and worse than useless references, which is a bad thing. On the other hand, these spammers (who are probably also scammers) are part of the ecosystem of our civilization. Like wolves in the forest, they selectively seek out the weakest victims and destroy them.

I mean, what kind of idiot would buy drugs from complete strangers on the net, knowing nothing about them except that they were criminals? If you are lucky, they'll just take your money and run. If you're unlucky, they might poison you and by the time you realized you might be dying. Also, your dying might make the world a better place. Because you are not just stupid, which could happen to anyone, but stupid and greedy and antisocial... more exactly, you are trying to work around the rules of society, which are set up to protect just people like you.

So in a manner of speaking, the scammers are simply doing the job Evolution wants done. Even if you could catch all of them and torture them to death - and I don't say this wouldn't be great fun, although my religion would keep me from joining in - there would be new ones tomorrow. In fact, there are already new ones tonight.