MetaTalk posts tagged with spam

SPAM

dortmunder — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:08:01 -0800

I just got an email using my metafilter user name that has been reproduced inside. Metafilter is the only site where I use this monkier, and I"m wondering exactly what the hell it is, and if anyone else has gotten it. It is called the "Living Life to the Full User Survey." Dear dortmunder, As a registered user of the Living Life to the Full website we would be grateful if you would answer a number of questions regarding your use of the site. Please click on the link below to begin the survey. It should take you less than 5 minutes to complete. http://www.livinglifetothefull.com/survey Why are we doing the survey? Your opinions and experiences matter to us at Living Life to the Full as they allow us to shape what improvements we make to the Living Life to the Full website. Even if you have limited use of the Living Life to the Full website – please let us know why that is and how we can improve the site to ensure you would be more likely to use it. If you have any further comments or queries regarding this survey please contact us at surveyqueries@onlineassessment.org.uk. Many thanks The Living Life to the Full Website Research Team This is a one off email but if you wish to unsubscribe you can by clicking the Unsubscribe Link

What the spam is this?

hal_c_on — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 08:42:13 -0800

Is this question/user serious? Why do I feel like this user is trying to ask MeFi how to send all sorts of spam? Is this acceptable on MeFi? I mean can someone actually poll MeFites THESE questions so they can become more effective spammers? Not trying to be a pain or anything, but as soon as I read that question, I thought "Oh shit...the beginnings of a spammer". Looking at his profile and previous questions pretty much confirmed it, and made it obvious that he's using the hive mind to poll a large group of people.

MetaFilter: #1 in the Jewelry Category!

wendell — Fri, 08 May 2009 21:20:26 -0800

I have sometimes felt I haven't gotten my 'due' for being one of the MetaFilter Early Adopters (user #206). But not today. I received this in my gmailbox: Subject: Request for Advertising Information. Do you accept banner or text link advertisements?2 Hello, My name is K***** G**** and I am part of the Marketing Team at A******, Inc. We are looking for quality sites to advertise on in the jewelry industry and came across yours while researching. We would be interested in advertising on www.metafilter.com Do you have an Advertising Rate card? Or, could you let me know the cost of banner and/or text links on the site? Also, can you tell me if you have any other websites related to the same category? I look forward to hearing from you. Somebody thinks I own metafilter.com! Yeah, it's a spammer and yeah they also think the site has something to do with the jewelry industry, but I'm still proud. Anybody else get strange $#!+ like this?

chococat creates something new on the internet

geos — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:31:08 -0800

...in which chococat creates something new on the internet.

MeFi is not for Spam?

rodgerd — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:22:53 -0800

Not cool - using your MeFi account to harvest email addresses of people who you disagree with, so you can sign them up to mailing lists? That's gotta be out of order, right? (in the event the post goes away: Just a note that there's someone hiding behind the IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx who is putting people's email addresses on spam farms associated with hate groups. So if you have your email address in your profile, I suggest removing it. posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:31 PM on October 30 [+] [!] )

HDMI Cables? Can I lift those with my pitchfork?

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:03:52 -0800

This post is distinctly spammy. The pleasure of answering questions and helping people in AskMeFi is the reward, not offers of free stuff.

I know the Sarah Palin thread has your attention but AskMe Spam Still Sucks

jason's_planet — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:30:24 -0800

This comment in AskMe is spam and should be deleted. And while I'm on the topic, the account itself looks pretty iffy. There's the name -- MagicWandShop -- and then there's the track record: two comments in a year, both of which refer to the user's business. All in all, this doesn't seem like an account that's going to contribute a whole lot to the community.

Spam from a MeFi user.

stbalbach — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:32:38 -0800

I don't know what the policy is on this but I just got this spam via MeFi email from someone I don't know or care to know: You have a new message from MeFi member br0chet: Hi, I'm a distributor located in province of Quebec. If you're looking for games like gba, ds, xbox 360, ps3, wii, bluray disc or dvds movies i can probably help you. I sell a lot to online sellers and always looking for new clients. I agree payment via paypal without a trouble. -- br0chet http://www.metafilter.com/user/77481

Spamspamspamspamspam

effugas — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:27:35 -0800

This quiz demands a cell phone number for results. SPAAAAAAAAAAAM Kind of a cool subject, and the thread is awesome, but that's pretty skeezy.

suspicious questions?

shmegegge — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:45:19 -0800

Just thought I'd mention that I noticed a couple of questions in askme that all had to do with ferreting out techniques people use to get around spam filters and the like. mind you, I'm not trying to cast aspersions on any of the people who asked those questions. It's entirely possible that every single one of them is legitimate. It simply occurred to me that perhaps the SEO and spam types have decided to ask metafilter how to get around their problems with innocent sounding questions. Am I just being paranoid?

Karnofsky alarm?

Skeptic — Sun, 11 May 2008 04:53:56 -0800

Isn't this Metafilter FPP slightly suspicious? Let's review the evidence: a) Double; b) From a very recent member; c) Single-link; d) To the website of a notorious self-publicist and spammer. My alarm is ringing pretty loudly there.

When the cat's away the mice will SPAM.

BrotherCaine — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:11:18 -0800

Can we please have an automatic deletion and/or penalty box for posts that get flagged for breaking guidelines by many users at times when no mod is online? I'm thinking of the Spammer that posted at 1:30 AM this morning, and how much I want him to be trampled to death by a pony. I know any automagic deletion system could potentially be gamed to censor worthy threads, but presumably a system could be set up where the mods could override any deletion in a fairly timely fashion. Plus any clickthrough on SPAM is too much in my opinion.

Metafilter self-fashioning

synecdoche — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:01:27 -0800

Is there something more to this post that got it deleted? It showed up in my RSS feed and I was interested to see the answers, but when I went to the thread I saw it had been deleted. I was a bit surprised-- though there is the one link to the geek fashion web site, otherwise seemed like a legitimate question offering an example of what the poster was looking for. I'm just curious if there is something that links puloxer to the website. (He hasn't posted anything else before, but I don't think that necessarily means that the post is only a plug and not also a legit AskMe.

Kind of weird

Burhanistan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 22:12:33 -0800

Someone is doing some strange spaming. It only seems on nickyskye's posts. Maybe someone kidnapped spock or hijacked his PC?

Sorry, indeed, but what strange, elaborate spam.

koeselitz — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 15:16:52 -0800

What the hell? Take Megadik and enjoy the reflection of your penis in the mirror! programme led jointly by Pinnacle and the City of Scientists at NASA say that new satellite images of 14-4 run gave the Eagles the lead. While Texas Tech The plot of Card Captors Sakura was based around a card Did you always wanted to enjoy an ordinary penis and ordinary women? We don.t believe it. And so we are here with our offer. Mega refers to "great". And our product MegaDik makes your phallus just great! Buy it and be delighted with your new sexual experiences! You.ll be so wondered... http://faourlinks.com/ MegaDik is your fortune! double standards, comparing the 9/11 attacks to the vendor site has been visited by 2268 companies, and 117 Director for Sheikh Usama Bin Laden for the organizing, indicted on charges related to the death of a black man discovered enormous ice water deposits in the south pole March, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower also be significant for the world economy and, ..oh sorry. postedby hobbesat 3:57-PM-on-February-1-[1 favorite -] [!]

LOLSEOSPAMMERSOLIDARITY

motty — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:07:24 -0800

Am I just being grumpy, or is now an odd time for a single link Times Online post? This story originated online, is well covered elsewhere, and, being on the subject of unfortunate product names, could have been turned into a perfectly good post by the addition of some other similar examples. But wasn't. Funnily enough, the poster shares a name and a location with some guy who works for an SEO company. That's just purely circumstantial of course and proves nothing. But now I'm really grumpy.

Mmmm, honey-glazed spam

flabdablet — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:41:19 -0800

Anybody else interested in participating in a MeFi spam honeypot? A few days ago, in response to mudpuppie's stated intent to spam the hell out of the scammer who hijacked his girlfriend's Hotmail account, I pointed out that since the scammer had a Gmail address, this wasn't going to achieve much other than improve Gmail's spam filter. In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth was, I included my own Gmail address in that reply. Within an hour, my Gmail spam folder was accumulating messages at about ten times the previous rate, which it continues to do. Also, I did actually start seeing one or two spam mails a day in the Inbox. That seems to have settled down now - I'm currently seeing about one a day. And then this post got me thinking about the value of cooperation in the Fight against Evildoers, which brings me (at last) to the point: If a bunch of Mefites with Gmail addresses in regular use were to post them in the same thread, we'd all likely get harvested by the same spambots, we'd all end up getting the same spam, and we'd all be sharing the (minimal) load of reporting that spam to the Gmail filters. I'd be really interested in finding out whether doing that would make a noticeable difference to the quality of those filters, as measured by the percentage of spam we each end up having to report. If nobody else wants to play, that's fine by me; there is very little spam making it past the filters in my own account right now, and dealing with it makes me happy: clicking Report Spam feels like playing a fun FPS right in my inbox. There are enough disposable Gmail accounts posted by anonymous Askers that I'm sure a MeFi honeypot effect is already happening to some extent. I still think it would be fun to play with this using Gmail accounts in regular, everyday use. Like this one: flabdablet@gmail.com Heeeeere, bot bot bot bot bot!

RTFA

Brak — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:55:52 -0800

The worst of MetaFilter The post on tracking down the "Ron Paul" spam botnet, while light on links, is still an interesting look at the technical forensics of tracking down the origin of the Ron Paul mass-spam mailing, worthy of discussion in its own right. Unfortunately, the comments were hijacked early on by people dead set on arguing with each other on the merits and drawbacks of Ron Paul as a presidential candidate, with equal doses of arguments on the philosophy of Libertarianism and Constitutional law, none of which has anything whatsoever to do with the content of the post. Folks, you can argue about any of these topics in any number of other forums on the internet. Instead, you've seen fit to ruin an otherwise perfectly good thread, either by not reading the content of the post, or by deciding that you didn't care about the topic, and deliberately derailing for your own pleasure. Either way, it's a disappointing thing to experience.

Ban...

hermitosis — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 09:50:46 -0800

Ban.

WTF, Wendell?

Kirth Gerson — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:26:45 -0800

So Wendell apparently harvested a bunch of Mefite email addresses and sent a pointless message to all of them, and a herd of the recipients went off on a "reply all" binge with equally pointless replies. Now I have a mailbox full of crap. This is without a doubt the lamest, most wrong-headed bullshit move I have experienced here. Thanks for nothing, jerx.

Comment spam

Sonny Jim — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:16:18 -0800

Vaguely relevant remark + 2(link to own website) + sales-pitch = inauspicious first comment.

Marketing plant?

Malor — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 02:50:49 -0800

This post might be a self-link with one level of indirection. It's certainly just marketing, regardless.

Smells Like Astroturfer

Plutor — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 05:41:24 -0800

Is PreacherTom an astroturfer? He's made 13 posts to the blue, all in the past couple of months. And all 13 of them start with a link to Business Week. There's someone with the same name on Netscape.com's digg-esque site who does the same thing, and one on StumbleUpon, too. And that's not all. Am I being paranoid? Is this even worth frowning on, as long as they're all decent posts?

Shilling projects in askme

MrMoonPie — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 09:45:01 -0800

Uh oh.

Egregious self-linking

anjamu — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 12:21:08 -0800

And the award for most obvious self-linker goes to ...