Hi there,
I've been noticing a trend with forum spam here on WPW and thought I'd post my observation. Perhaps there would be a way to automate the detection of this trend and eliminate the spam before legitimate WPW members spend their valuable time responding to these link dropping attempts.
For example, there's a recent WPW post
here and if you copy some of the post text into Google (inside quotes) you'll find that the exact same post was originally made (word for word) on seochat back in
March 2004
Another example, this WPW
post is a word for word copy of
this post at digitalpoint.
I have seen several others like this.
So, it appears that the robots posting forum spam here are actually scraping their posts from other related forums (presumably in an effort to attract responses and create some "buzz" on their link-dropped forum posting).
Perhaps this is a well-known issue, but I'd not seen it before and it occurs to me that WPW could employ some method utilizing Google to detect word for word copied posts and at the very least disabling the links (post links and signature) and labelling the post as a heads-up for real WPW users. Ideally, WPW could just delete them automatically, but I realize that might be going too far.
Anyway, I thought I'd post this and see if my observations are useful.
Jade