Forum spam is the creating of messages that are advertisements, abusive, or otherwise unwanted on Internet forums. It is generally done by automated spambots, or manually with unscrupulous intentions.
Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and any other web forms to submit spam links to. These spambots often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs present. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Not all of the spam posts are meant for the readers; some spam messages are simply hyperlinks intended to boost search engine ranking.
Most forum spam consists of links to external sites, with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive areas such as weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Some of these links contain code to track the spambot's identity if a sale goes through, when the spammer behind the spambot works on commission.
Spam posts may contain anything from a single link, to dozens of links. Text content is minimal, usually innocuous and unrelated to the forum's topic, or in a very old thread that is revived by the spammer solely for the purpose of spamming links. Some text is included to prevent the post being caught by automated spam filters that prevent posts which consist solely of external links from being submitted. Full banner advertisements have also been reported.[by whom?]
Alternatively, the spam links are posted in the user's signature, in which case the spambot will never post. The link sits quietly in the signature field, where it is more likely to be harvested by search engine spiders than discovered by forum administrators and moderators.
Since November 2006, a very destructive forum and wiki spam attack has been propagated by inserting into comments redirect domains with an automated posting script like XRumer. These domains redirect a user to pornographic websites. If a user clicks on the image or attempts to close the Website an ActiveX codec will be downloaded as a Zlob Trojan. The spambot can often bypass many of the safeguards administrators use to reduce the amount of spam posted.
Spam prevention and deletions measurably increase the workload of forum administrators and moderators. The amount of time and resources spent keeping a forum spam free contributes significantly to labor cost, and the skill required in the running of a public forum. Marginally profitable or smaller forums may be permanently closed by administrators.
Administrators may block the ip address of the spammer and in severe cases the whole ip rage from that internet gateway provider. Thus a lack of connection from that spammers location, and neighbors will not have those resources, information, and access to the domain, or a server which house hundreds of websites, the administrators has the option to block from an entire region. Thus the spammer interferes with their communities - family and friends - internet connections and its resources that too will be blocked from.
Page widening is the intentional or accidental act of posting a long string of unbroken characters or a wide image to a forum, increasing the web page's width excessively, to the point where other users cannot read the text without scrolling the screen left and right. Page widening is undertaken by internet trolls who wish to render a page harder to read, and is one of the Slashdot trolling phenomena.
Page widening can be triggered by a wide image, a very long string of characters without breaks, a long line with the specification that the browser should not break it (for instance, use of the HTML tags <pre> or <nobr>), a table with many columns, in particular if columns contain a long word (the minimum width of a column is the width of the longest word in it) or a table where the HTML specifies a large width.
Although some forums detect and prevent such page widening, often by inserting spaces into excessively long text strings, some forum software fails to take into account that the reader may be using a lower screen resolution (such as on a PDA or mobile phone), a smaller window size or a larger font.
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