Spam and the notsofasteddie threads
Posted: Wed 17th Mar 2021 06:39 pm
Many here will remember Notsofasteddie who made no less than 5975 posts between 2011 and 2018. He's still a member but hasn't logged in to the forum for a couple of years now.
Most of his posts consisted entirely of content recycled from other websites. This was a constant issue for me because it looked very spammy and I suspected he was being supplied the material ready-formatted by spammers.
One thing that suggested I might be wrong about that was the complaints I occasionally got from people saying he'd used material without permission. In one extreme case last year a publisher had the whole ACD shut down briefly for a copyright infringement in a Notsofasteddie post (see here).
Even that is not conclusive though because in the past I've actually had spammers contact me asking for their own spam (that I'd missed) to be deleted. This has happened when they've found that their spam was having a negative impact on their ranking, possibly after Google updated its algorithm. It's a murky world this cat and mouse game between Google and spammers trying to get their sites listed higher in search results.
I've always been bombarded with emails from people asking for pricing on 'guest posts' but in recent years a pattern has emerged. They often cite specific Notsofasteddie posts as an example of the kind of thing they're looking for, which suggests that spammers see these as spam posts. I've even had requests for new links edited into these posts. You may have noticed that many spammers make their posts as replies in Notsofasteddie threads.
Many times I've considered deleting all of these spam-magnet posts. It's quite easy for me to do that and all of the posts are at least two years old now. The trouble with any mass deletion of old posts is that it leaves a lot of mess behind. There will be replies to the posts that would no longer make sense if the post they were referring to had gone. Also, not all of the thousands of posts are so spammy.
Any thoughts?
Most of his posts consisted entirely of content recycled from other websites. This was a constant issue for me because it looked very spammy and I suspected he was being supplied the material ready-formatted by spammers.
One thing that suggested I might be wrong about that was the complaints I occasionally got from people saying he'd used material without permission. In one extreme case last year a publisher had the whole ACD shut down briefly for a copyright infringement in a Notsofasteddie post (see here).
Even that is not conclusive though because in the past I've actually had spammers contact me asking for their own spam (that I'd missed) to be deleted. This has happened when they've found that their spam was having a negative impact on their ranking, possibly after Google updated its algorithm. It's a murky world this cat and mouse game between Google and spammers trying to get their sites listed higher in search results.
I've always been bombarded with emails from people asking for pricing on 'guest posts' but in recent years a pattern has emerged. They often cite specific Notsofasteddie posts as an example of the kind of thing they're looking for, which suggests that spammers see these as spam posts. I've even had requests for new links edited into these posts. You may have noticed that many spammers make their posts as replies in Notsofasteddie threads.
Many times I've considered deleting all of these spam-magnet posts. It's quite easy for me to do that and all of the posts are at least two years old now. The trouble with any mass deletion of old posts is that it leaves a lot of mess behind. There will be replies to the posts that would no longer make sense if the post they were referring to had gone. Also, not all of the thousands of posts are so spammy.
Any thoughts?