From the sublime to the ridiculous

Darren said: "The last two joiners have been banned. The first guy was selling Sony's. The last guy represented Al Qaeda, believe it or not, and wanted to post links to letters to ****. LOL, I'm gonna start smacking webmasters soon."

Heather said: "Sound like some real quality people looking to join.. When you really stop and look at things, the "volume" really gets cranked down."

edwin said: "he said hello and i missed it?"

chris3471 said: "I can understand a person coming to a forum to try and drop a link to their site but coming here to try and sell something or to drop those PayPal money letters those people really irritate me. We are WEBMASTERS, we aren't STUPID and we weren't born yesterday."

edwin said: "im pretty sure someone is selling a script that automates vbulletin spamming."

quinny said: "[QUOTE=chris3471] We are WEBMASTERS, we aren't STUPID[/QUOTE] you'd be suprised... do de do... la la la :D ;)"

edwin said: "i think we're pretty stupid. and friendly. bad combo :)"

chris3471 said: "Well I meant not dumb enough to fall for some get rich quick scheme."

edwin said: "exactly. dumb enough to talk to a viagra salesman and review his site, but not stupid enough to buy the product :)"

chris3471 said: "Lol, I rarely ever review any sites though. I did when I first got here but after a while you get sick of it, most of the time the webmaster requesting the review doesn't even say thanks. Besides I have better things to do than to tell a bunch of would be webmasters what's wrong with their sites all day every day. I won't go so far as to say that requesting a review is a bad thing but if that's all you are coming here for then it's nothing more than spamming. I've asked for reviews a few times myself but I'm a regular here, for a regular it's like asking some friends for some advice."

Darren said: "Take a look at the threads in there now. The Pagerank bumped his thread to tell us he has a PR 4. Does he want us to review his new PR? WTF? I'm happy to help legit webmasters (in the 1% of cases they exist)."

chris3471 said: "I've noticed on some other boards they won't let you leave a live link or request a review until you make like 10 posts, why not see if you can do that it would cut down a lot on the spamming I think."

Darren said: "Nope. That would increase your spam count by exactly 10 posts :)"

Heather said: "Posting bots could easily accomplish 10 posts. The new direction of web-mastery is going to be to run a much tighter ship. People coming into just drop a link is no good."

Darren said: "Like the guy from m***.org. He was the last reg, about an hour ago. He came in looking for m***.org. He found a fake profile he made. Today, he registered as a woman, and placed the same ad in the profile. Haha, these guys are precious."

chris3471 said: "Oh, I hadn't thought about that. I was only thinking of the human bots."

Darren said: "Again, though: how hard is it for the human bot? "UR funny, chris...lol" - that's one. And so on and so on.... What kind of interesting content is a review? It means: hey all, I know you have a website here and I'd love for you to visit. To think they actually read the feedback is sort of hard to believe."

Heather said: "There are clever programmers out there that can easily write a utility to do the "heavy typing" They're here to try and get maybe a little traffic and/or a link.."

chris3471 said: "But how much traffic does that really get you? And those made for AdSense sites, We're webmasters and we rarely click ads so how much money can one make spamming a webmaster board?"

Darren said: "Not much per site. But, if you can automate or semi-automate it and you hit thousands of boards, the numbers may add up. I doubt it. N2K's site has a PR 1 now. Most of his backlinks are Web-mastery posts in the sig. That is not much PR spread, at all."

Heather said: ""Funny how things work out sometimes, it's F'ing hilarious" Billy Bob Thornton.. Bad Santa"

Darren said: "Funny how things turn out. [quote] "Hey Everyone, I'm Osama Bin Laden. Would you please review my new Adipex website?" - an actual forum spam [/quote]"