In which, having been Recently Duped, I attempt to describe the Current Perspective on Diaries and Comments which are Attempting to use the Pages of Daily Kos for their Nefarious Wiles in Subverting the Free Market and Search Engines of the Internet.
(And that's all the Regency Diarying caps pretense/style that I can manage for now.)
At the moment, I'm still kicking myself for having missed some rather sophisticated spamming that's been going on for the last nine months, and was just caught yesterday, courtesy of the diarist getting a bit too cute with Meteor Blades. (I bow to the Master.)
Spam: What is it, and why does it matter?
Well, first, it's an attempt to get advertising on the cheap. The links you see (or don't see - more later) are not so much an attempt to get you to click through and buy as they are to increase the number of live pages that search engine robotic programs, hereafter known as bots, will pick up as they roam the internet. The intensity of the effort to push a given site farther up on a Goodle search is incredible, because success translates to very hard dollars.
Once in a very long while, it is a direct attempt to write a free ad for some website or product, as well as pushing for search engine hits.
In both cases, it's something we'd rather not have cluttering up the pages of Daily Kos, or taking up space on the Recent Diaries list. It's an ongoing fight, and just about a third of the Hidden Comments, on a normal day, are spam.
Comment Spam
This is an area where bots can be set against bot-friendly spam, and elfling has done just that. The first clue is spotting a brand spanking new user who leaves a hyperlink in the text of a comment. With more than a few other parameters, that is what the primary spambot program tests for. If you see a comment hidden by scoop and despaminate3000, you are seeing a result of that program.
Note: if you see such a comment, and the link seems a legitimate part of a reply to the current diary, please inform the Help Desk, because the bots are not perfect, and we need to catch their mistakes, too.
We've recently seen a number of spam comments that are attempting to get around the links usage with a number of different tricks. If you drop an HR (DK slang includes donut, pastry, hydrating, etc.) on this kind of comment, and you have time, notify the Help Desk, because multiple comments (so far, 20 is the best anyone has managed) may have to be Hidden, and that takes an administrator to handle. If such a comment has 2 HRs, check the user Profile before adding your own, because a) two is sufficient to Hide the comment, and b) if the user is already banned, there's no need to waste a good donut.
Diary Spam
Most Diary Spam is fairly obvious, and the procedure for handling it is as follows:
1. Edit the diary tags and replace them with Spam
2. Hide Rate the Tip Jar.
Two HRs is sufficient to ban a brand new user, and the Spam tag flags the diary for manual deletion as soon as it is spotted, which gets it off the Recent list ASAP.
Note: If it's not quite so obvious, wait a bit. Drop a comment asking someone else to check before you obliterate the tags. We have some very inventive legitimate users running around who will occasionally snark in this direction.
What to look for
The obvious: links, tags, or direct references in the diary to a company name. Sometimes not quite as obvious as it sounds, when they're included in tips for weatherproofing, or writing techniques for bloggers, or....
The not so obvious: A well written and reasonably timely diary about a subject of interest to DK members, with a number of good links and one spam link thrown in somewhere in the middle. This is what caught us this last time, and it's a pain to deal with. What it means is, even if you don't read the diary, take the time to mouse over all the links to see where they'll take you.
The totally non-obvious: A short, fairly well written diary on a recent story with at least one real link, that also includes one or more hidden links to sites. We had a rash of these last year which seemed to be short recaps of articles from The Guardian, some of them including several hundred hidden links. The trick to checking these is to highlight a paragraph or so of the text and View Selection Source. If what you see on the Source window is the same text you've highlighted plus a few HTML tags, it's good. If what comes up is links that weren't visible in the diary itself, you've found a spammer. Make sure you leave a comment to that effect, because it won't be obvious to many other users, either, and the diary is likely to be uprated by someone who doesn't understand the problem.
Things About Spam I have missed:
Please add them in the comments - I'll try to update the diary as they come along.
8:07am CDT
Rugby Mom reminds me below that Spam Diaries give us some of the best ever open threads. If you find a diary with a hidden tip jar and comments that are mostly inane (but good!) snark, especially if it involves rock crushers, that's a solid clue.
8:33 am CDT
se portland reminded me that checking to see how long a user has been here is not always an intuitive thing. Open the user Profile (right-click on the username) in a new tab, and check the Joined date on the left of the page to see how long a particular paragon of virtue has been with us. ;)
9:46 am CDT
I've included a hidden link that you can look at/play with here http://www.dailykos.com/...