First, a disclaimer: I’m just an internet geek, not a security specialist and not actually affiliated with HDB except that I’m owned by Scout and Scraps. I just know that we’re all sick of the spamming and many of you seem to want to know how the spam keeps getting through.

The spammers appear to be using a combination of human and bot to do this, so it will probably be next to impossible to keep them completely out. They’ve apparently decided this forum is worth the effort for some reason, so it’s going to be hard to get them to go away. (A bot is a small program that hunts out places to leave their info and links.)

On my own blog, I had to go to a “Turing test” to keep the spammers away. (That’s just a quick question to prove that you’re a hooman and not a bot - like asking you to add 3+5 and enter the answer in a box) a Turing test will help if only bots are hitting a site - but it won’t help if you have an actual person entering the spam.

Since HDB requires an account to be able to create posts, I’m guessing that this person is sitting down to create an account or multiple accounts, and then letting the bot loose to post willy-nilly. And since most spammers know to mask their IP in some way, just banning specific IP (think your internet “address”) won’t work either. In fact, most people’s internet providers don’t offer you a single IP address - instead, they offer a group of people a pool of addresses and every time you log on to the internet, you might have a slightly different address. So, if you ban a spammer’s IP address, you might actually ban real Hot Dog bloggers instead of the spammer!

Most blog spam-detection programs are designed to make sure that people are not leaving spamments, but that they are leaving real comments. Off the top of my head, I would guess that there are not too many spam-detectors programmed to make sure that someone’s actual blog post is not spam. That’s a whole different programming issue. So I’m sure that Todd is trying to get something in place - but this isn’t a common request. (I don’t think anyway.)

The better solution is one that I understand may be very difficult to implement here given the little I’ve gleaned of the HDB’s past history. So far as I can see (without the whole picture of the back-end programming of the blog & exactly how the spammer is getting in), we need a couple of moderators to simply delete those posts. Were I Todd, however, I would be very cautious about who I gave that status to - because they would have to power to utterly destroy the Hot Dog Blog if they were unethical, held a grudge, got in a fight, et cetera.

In other words, the situation all boils down to this: if you see a post title with WoW, Warhammer, Warcraft, power leveling, gold farming, CD Key, or the like, don’t click through. If you’re creating a post, try not to use those words in the title.
Ain’t the best solution in the world, but it’s the only one we’re likely to have until Todd can find someone to create a good spam program for us.

(Just to say again, I’m NOT speaking for Todd and I’m not affiliated with HDB except by the fact that I’m owned by two doxies.)
Hope this helps some folks understand what’s going on and has been helpful to you.

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