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(I work at Craigslist) It's surprising that most of those spammers forums are totally open although there are some attacks not described or discused in any of
by ews 18y ago
(I work at Craigslist)
It's surprising that most of those spammers forums are totally open although there are some attacks not described or discused in any of them. Spammers, as individuals, are far less technical that we think (most of them are just users and costumers of a limited set of programs) and need those forums to contact to each other and solve their problems and technical doubts.
It was known beforehand that there would be a phone number and verified account black market. It's possible to block most of them (most) as there are federal databases that can be queried for the origin of a given number (whether is voip,cell or home line).
Making them pay for the priviledge to autopost can lead to interesting spamming blocking techniques as we just try to increase their cost per post beyond profit (which is very low for a single post). This is not the only cost increasing technique we are using but sadly it is impossible to share or discuss or ask for feedback of any of them on an open forum.
- d0mine 18y agoYou do realize that craig is dedicated to this 'game' just as we are. There are measures he could put in place to rid spam completely, but luckily for him spam actually inflates the page view statistics for CL. Which in turn drives up the sales of post for the RE and jobs sections. This is due in part to the 'spam'. EDIT: It is a quote from the submitted link.
- Hexstream 18y agoI really hope I'm misunderstanding. You're saying spammers benefit CL by dramatically reducing the average quality of postings down to almost nothing and that the illegitimate page "views" of bots make up for loss of legitimate page views by actual users that are lost by aforementionned loss of quality and that Craig actually loves it? You're out of your mind. By the way I'm interested in knowing that secret to "rid spam completely" that Craig sits on. edit: Really interesting to see the kind of lame excuses people can come up with. I guess when you're dishonest with everyone then you're also dishonest with yourself. Or is it the other way around?
- Hexstream 18y agoOh, I'm sorry. I didn't read all the posts to the end. Well, that timely illustrates one of the many problems stemming from the lack of blockquote! I thought you were writing in italics just for kicks.