Forum and Comment Spam

Posted:  May 14th, 2018

 

Description:

 

This kind of spam includes unsolicited advertisements as comments on forums, blogs, wikis and online guestbooks. This kind of advertising is a violation of KEKhost/KEKhosting's acceptable use policy and is therefor prohibited. For those who are using this method purposely to advertise must cease the activity immediately. Those who have received reports of this activity going on without their knowledge will likely have to do some investigation to find the processes performing the activity and put a stop to it.

 

Background of Issue

 

This type of spam has been around since the invent of guest-books and search engines.  It first appeared in Internet guest-books as posts to the guestbook with a link to their own site and with no actual comment. This link was intended to help ranking the site to which the spam was linking better on search engines.  If an actual comment given was usually something like "cool page", "nice website", or keywords related to the spammed link.

 

In 2003, Spammers started to take advantage of the open commenting systems in blogging software like Wordpress and Movable type by placing comments to other blog posts that provided links to the spammer's website.  Many blogging software packages now have modules available to them that can block this kind of spam by making it difficult to automatically post on such blogs or actually reviewing and rating the URL provided to determine if it is allowed or not.  For every tool to stop the posting of forum and comment spam there are tools to circumvent them.

 

Recommendations for Resolution

The methods used in the article titled Outbound Hostile Traffic to find the source of outbound connections to other websites and stop and remove them is the best way to resolve this issue.