spamming in chat rooms

[RandallW]

I'm a baseball fan who spends some time in chat rooms. I've noticed a person, or robot who comes into these chat rooms and makes a nuisance of himself/itself with a flood of advertsing for this website and the Fightingsioux.com website. Is there someone here who knows what i'm talking about, and can do something about this?

[jimdahl]

I'm a baseball fan who spends some time in chat rooms. I've noticed a person, or robot who comes into these chat rooms and makes a nuisance of himself/itself with a flood of advertsing for this website...

Definitely a robot. In recent months, services have come into existence that, for a modest fee, will spam an advertising message onto hundreds of thousands of message boards. At first, we dealt with it primarily be deleting the offending message. Late this week, I modified the rules of the board such that new users can't post until manually approved by me. I hope to take additional measures soon, as I determine additional ways to block the robots without interfering with legitimate new users.

[RandallW]

Definitely a robot. In recent months, services have come into existence that, for a modest fee, will spam an advertising message onto hundreds of thousands of message boards. At first, we dealt with it primarily be deleting the offending message. Late this week, I modified the rules of the board such that new users can't post until manually approved by me. I hope to take additional measures soon, as I determine additional ways to block the robots without interfering with legitimate new users.

The problem is not that the spam is here, on this message board; it's in chat rooms that are run by a company that MLB hired ( Prospero ).

I was hoping that someone here knew who the spammer is.

[jimdahl]

It's unlikely to be one person or company. Those funny "type in the letters" things you see when you register for new message boards or buy tickets (CAPTCHAs) are meant to differentiate humans from programs. When someone develops a program that can defeat a certain CAPTCHA, they distribute it, sell it, and offer forum spamming using it as a for-fee service.

When that happens, you'll see a lot of spam across a certain class of message boards / blogs / etc... (in your case, Prospero). Once that's a problem, the only real remedy is for the operator or administrator of the software to put in additional blocking measures; the odds of shutting it down on the other end are very low (given their strong economic incentive to spam, and that they're usually outside U.S. law in places such as Russia).

[Hammersmith]

Pardon me for butting my nose in, but I think RandallW is saying that someone is spamming the chatroom he frequents for this website. Since I doubt that you(Jim) and UND(for fightingsioux.com) are responsible, I think he wants to know if it's someone else from this site. Since you are quite respected, perhaps a general comment from you might get this unknown poster to stop hurting siouxsports.com's reputation and quit spamming chatrooms. If he's spamming one, he's probably spamming others, and that's not the kind of advertising this fine website needs.

[jimdahl]

Pardon me for butting my nose in, but I think RandallW is saying that someone is spamming the chatroom he frequents for this website. Since I doubt that you(Jim) and UND(for fightingsioux.com) are responsible, I think he wants to know if it's someone else from this site. Since you are quite respected, perhaps a general comment from you might get this unknown poster to stop hurting siouxsports.com's reputation and quit spamming chatrooms. If he's spamming one, he's probably spamming others, and that's not the kind of advertising this fine website needs.

Ahhh... thanks for your help, your interpretation is obviously correct. I got lost in one train of thought and never quite recovered.

I don't see any traffic coming into the site from links from baseball or other off-topic chat rooms. If they're archived and Randall can provide a link, I'll take a look.

If it is happening and the perpetrator is reading this, please don't spam other boards on our behalf, we don't want it or need it. However, given the lack of economic incentive to do so and that the obvious reaction to off-topic spam would be backlash instead of interest, I'd be a little surprised if it were from someone actually trying to support this site.

[RandallW]

Apparently there is miscommunication here.

The chat rooms I am talking of are the Gameday chat rooms linked to the Gameday feature used by MLB.com. The chat rooms ( not message boards, but live real time chat ) are actually created by Prospero, but their customer/tech support doesn't really exist ( there are e-mail or snail mail addresses, but they don't acknowledge that they even have received people's mail ), and MLB takes no responsibility for the chat rooms.

The spammer comes into the rooms and advertises the Fightingsioux.com and Siouxsports.com websites; it also claims that certain baseball franchises have signed an agreement for the spammer to provide updates on events for the fightingsioux ( I believe these agreements don't even exist ).

The bot tends to duplicate itself, it comes in as Siouxdome, spams, comes in again as Siouxdome_2, spams, Siouxdome leaves, Siouxdome_3 enters and spams, Siouxdome_2 leaves.....etc.

[jimdahl]

Apparently there is miscommunication here.

Yep, sorry for my continued misunderstanding in the earlier posts; but I believe my last post (of 12:03) correctly addressed the actual situation.

I can assure you that it isn't coming from here. In fact, as I alluded to before, I doubt the spam is even from a fan of these sites trying to advertise them; such spamming at people who aren't even interested in this team would only anger people, not make them fans.