Don’t freak if the Potomac’s a funny color today

[Terpfan]

They seem to think it came from Roaches Run as they have those orange barrier things out in that part at northern end of DCA/MVT junction.

[timo96]

about 4 summers ago I discovered a fuel oil spill while crossing the wooden plank thing on the MVT near TR island and called it in. There was a fairly sizable spill response iirc.

Was probably an illegal dumping from a UST in one of the apartments or office in Rosslyn or something.

[PotomacCyclist]

The forum index is looking a little funny (or annoying) today too. We need an anti-spammer spray or zapper.

[PotomacCyclist]

Still more “illegal dumping” (spam) on the forum too.

[Tim Kelley]

@PotomacCyclist 134812 wrote:

Still more “illegal dumping” (spam) on the forum too.

Taken care of! Some of us aren’t up at 1:00 in the morning!!

[PotomacCyclist]

I just didn’t want the spammer to have the benefit of taking over the top of the index completely. At one point, he/she/it had filled up 2 or 3 entire pages of the index. I’m not sure why they do that, especially when none of the text was in English or even English characters. Do they think that someone on a U.S. website will see a huge wall of text and garbled computer symbols and think, wow, that sounds like a great deal?

[Tim Kelley]

Attempts at SEO? Someone practicing writing a script? Who knows?

[AFHokie]

Forum spambot? I’m assuming it’s entirely automated.

[ursus]

@PotomacCyclist 134828 wrote:

I just didn’t want the spammer to have the benefit of taking over the top of the index completely. At one point, he/she/it had filled up 2 or 3 entire pages of the index. I’m not sure why they do that, especially when none of the text was in English or even English characters. Do they think that someone on a U.S. website will see a huge wall of text and garbled computer symbols and think, wow, that sounds like a great deal?

I didn’t see any links in any of the messages.

[PotomacCyclist]

Not links. I think some of the non-English characters weren’t displaying properly, so they were replaced by generic computer-generated symbols. Things like blank squares and random symbols. Maybe I just didn’t have the proper language packs set up on my computer, but I could see most of the non-English characters.

[PotomacCyclist]

@AFHokie 134830 wrote:

Forum spambot? I’m assuming it’s entirely automated.

I think they hire people to sign up and post those spam messages. They could bring in someone off the street at a small overseas Internet cafe or computer sweatshop.

There are limits to how often someone can post, which is an anti-spam measure. But the spammers get around it by waiting a couple minutes between posts. The time gaps are irregular, from what I saw by reading down the index page. The gaps were 3 or 4 minutes, with a pause for about 10 minutes, and then another stream of spam posts. They also switch accounts after 20 posts or so. I think that would be more difficult to do with a spambot. Labor in many countries is very cheap. Those spammers can just hire people at minimal cost to set up accounts and post spam for hours on multiple forums and websites. Those people don’t need to be skilled at hacking. They can just follow the regular sign-up process, which isn’t difficult to learn. Then the spammer hirees can go through the Captcha process to prove they are humans and not spambots.

I don’t have proof of this but I’ve assumed that’s what is going on. I think this is also the case when we see new accounts opened from Bangladesh (or usually bangladesh without capitalization) or India and the person tries to be friendly but doesn’t post about anything remotely related to cycling or bikes or even transportation. (I mention Bangladesh and India because those are two of the most common countries I see listed for the spammers on this forum. I think I saw Nepal once too. There are also some spammers listed as being from “United States” with no city listed.)

[ursus]

@PotomacCyclist 134846 wrote:

I think they hire people to sign up and post those spam messages. They could bring in someone off the street at a small overseas Internet cafe or computer sweatshop.

There are limits to how often someone can post, which is an anti-spam measure. But the spammers get around it by waiting a couple minutes between posts. The time gaps are irregular, from what I saw by reading down the index page. The gaps were 3 or 4 minutes, with a pause for about 10 minutes, and then another stream of spam posts. They also switch accounts after 20 posts or so. I think that would be more difficult to do with a spambot. Labor in many countries is very cheap. Those spammers can just hire people at minimal cost to set up accounts and post spam for hours on multiple forums and websites. Those people don’t need to be skilled at hacking. They can just follow the regular sign-up process, which isn’t difficult to learn. Then the spammer hirees can go through the Captcha process to prove they are humans and not spambots.

I don’t have proof of this but I’ve assumed that’s what is going on. I think this is also the case when we see new accounts opened from Bangladesh (or usually bangladesh without capitalization) or India and the person tries to be friendly but doesn’t post about anything remotely related to cycling or bikes or even transportation. (I mention Bangladesh and India because those are two of the most common countries I see listed for the spammers on this forum. I think I saw Nepal once too. There are also some spammers listed as being from “United States” with no city listed.)

That makes sense. It also explains how they know the color of George Washington’s white bicycle.

[AFHokie]

@PotomacCyclist 134846 wrote:

Post

Its too detailed to explain via phone typing.

Google “forum spambot” and you’ll find multiple sites explaining how they work & why most (if not all) are automated.

Speaking of George’s white bike; the entire Oxford English Dictionary is somewhere around 500-600 megabytes. An automated program can run the entire dictionary against questions like that in less time than it took me to type this.

[ursus]

@AFHokie 134855 wrote:

Its too detailed to explain via phone typing.

Google “forum spambot” and you’ll find multiple sites explaining how they work & why most (if not all) are automated.

Speaking of George’s white bike; the entire Oxford English Dictionary is somewhere around 500-600 megabytes. An automated program can run the entire dictionary against questions like that in less time than it took me to type this.

So perhaps the questions should have two-word answers.

[Author]

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