Category Archives: Spam Research

This is where we talk about our spam research

SPAM Testing Back on new platform

We are now spam testing on Questions2Answers Q&A Platform. As usual, it started out with a few legitimate questions to build search engine ranking and to get noticed. The platform can be seen here: https://zylblog.com/answers/ Current settings require a CAPTCHA … Continue reading

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Last Results from Spam Testing

November 23rd at 6:13PM: We shut the spam testing site down. Since December 24th, 2011, there were a total of: 325,008 posts in 246,957 topics by 291,210 spammers. If you are interested in receiving a copy of the MySQL database … Continue reading

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Spambot Updates: Next steps, account activation testing

We are taking the next step in our spambot experimentation, it begins today. We are once again completely resetting the test forums. The main change for this next round is to see how many bots can get past email activation. To … Continue reading

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Next steps: How Spambots use email

Our most recent bit of research is looking at how spambots use the email addresses that we register. We want to find out if spambots attend the email addresses they register at and if they are using real persons email … Continue reading

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How to discern convincing spam from real comments

SPAM is becoming more and more convincing. After years of dealing with it, it never occurred to me that to new site owners it can be very difficult to tell convincing spam from real messages. Computers are becoming better at … Continue reading

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Spam Research: Experiment Continued on SMF Forum

A continuation of the Spambot Experiment with an SMF forum, read about the first experiment here: https://zylblog.com/2011/12/spambot-experiment/ The forums were completely wiped out on the 24th of December (all registered members were deleted, all posts removed, etc). A few options … Continue reading

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Spambot Experiment

On August 28, 2011, I started a spambot experiment on my website. One inaccuracy that I want to clear up before I begin posting the results: About a month or so into the experiment, I changed the difficulty of the … Continue reading

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