Have you ever seen this before?

Not new. I’ve been seeing and flagging stuff like this practically every night for at least a year, maybe much longer.

You mean this constantly happens on here?

Yes. Sometimes it’s automotive dealers, sometimes personal products, sometimes legal services—all kinds of stuff. I’ve gotten so I can pick them out on sight, just by glancing at the names in the community feed, and be right most of the time.

Well it’s the first time I see something like that. So they only come out at night lol? Well I PM’d Auggie about it

I don’t know about that. I only come out at night (or in the afternoon, but I see most of them at night). Sometimes I can just watch the feed for a few minutes and see them roll by. When I pause to look, I can pick off up to three at a time just from the ten listings that may show for no more than a few seconds.

@Jeruba you on are fire girl!! :-p xxx

I’ve seen it yeah, be funny if some gigolo came on attempting to sell his “services”...call himself sexybumtime or summink, a few desperate cougars on here, so…XD

From an ex-mod: I’d say 80% of mod duties include manually checking the new registrations and banning profile spammers. It goes on all the time.

@Jeruba is quite right. Profile spam is nothing new. You certainly can watch the feed and see new people joining and click on their names and find spam very often. If you find some, flag it. We’ll get rid of it.

Sorry but I banned the spammer you linked to! :o(

To echo @Seek_Kolinahr, it happens constantly on Fluther. We easily ban upwards of 20 profile spammers (on average) per day. Folks try to sell jellies everything from raspberry ketones, to green coffee bean extract, to web hosting, to used cars in Peoria. It is a constant battle and it takes many hours to stay in front of these people.

I just thought I would mention that in the last five minutes I banned folks whose profiles were hawking Toshiba products, country homes (?), coupon websites, sepic tank cleaning, some kind of miracle weight loss product, carpet cleaning, and machinery movers.

Yep, it happens a lot. I flag them when I see them, but they’re usually yanked down pretty quickly.

I like a couple of the auto part stores and plumbers ; >)
I’ve gotten use a couple of advertisers / SPAMMERS a week, the mods seem to keep them at bay.

I forward to the mods, don’t remember what it was, about a month or two ago.

Yup, I asked a question about it not long ago. I can’t help thinking that there’s someone out there telling these folks to try this specifically at Fluther, just like the tumblr “how to get more followers” advice pages do.

You mods are doing a damn fine job then, if those guys disappear quickly. I seriously have never seen that on Fluther before. Thanks for the answers yall.

you killed my mattress man

I have this picture of @Jeruba, @Bellatrix and @Augustlan sitting in their individual rooms with a wall full of tiny little silver bells and all the bells are connected to a computer with a screen in the middle of the wall. Every once in a while one the computer will detect a certain word or phrase and a specific little bell tinkles.

And one of them will come running to pass judgement and smite the wicked.

I also believe they have certain flutherites that have their own bells as well

My favorite was a user named Doggles, who was advertising her home company that manufactured… Goggles for dogs.

It’s a never-ending battle! I get a lot of PMs and emails pointing me to the profile spammers we’ve missed, and I sincerely appreciate that.

@bookish1 On one forum I was on years ago, some bot made an account and PM’d people, trying to sell frozen bowls of soup. I was like, the hell? Me and this guy decided to PM them back to see if they would reply. We made some message like, frozen soup! Oh boy oh boy! What a wonderful idea! They didn’t reply. Damn bungholes. XD

@Symbeline: I’ll sell you a bowl of frozen soup right now. Just give me your bank account number first, and I’ll pop it right in the mail ;)

@rojo, I don’t do any smiting. I’m not a mod (and never will be). Little bells, though, yeah. Of silver.

The other day there were 4 or so accounts linked to pure bred dogs. It’s a constant @Symbeline and is not new at all. Some just make their spamming more obvious than others.

@SpatzieLover, it looks like another one just joined. A lot of spammers come in tag-team pairs, one to post a question and the other to answer it.

@bookish1 SOLD! Hmm, booky soup. <_<

@SpatzieLover The spambots talk to each other?

…that’s actually damn creepy.

I meant @Jeruba, not @SpatzieLover

damn ten minute time limit

So—here’s the punch line to that one. Just as an example.

It’s such a beautiful thing when two first-time posters find each other! Almost as if they were made for each other by a single being… oh wait, they were.

Elephants hate spam but lurve peanuts!

@Pachyderm_In_The_Room : Watch out, now Google will be sending you targeted ads for peanuts!!!

@bookish1 LOL LOL IPIMP ( I’m pissing in my pants )

Yes, @bookish1, but I’ve got a tough hide.

Hey homies, you guys were right, these fuckers do come out here at night! I found another one today, trying to sell cars. Nascars, to be precise. FUCK Nascar. lol I’m hyper

So far this morning I have banned sellers of Mercedes car parts, plumbing fixtures, age serum, fashion, athletic shoes, mosquito repellent, organic food, web hosting, personal injury law, credit repair, and a Wiccan priestess offering love spells. I really can’t help but wonder if these guys really think that posting a profile on Fluther is going to send their business skyrocketing. It doesn’t seem like much of a marketing plan.

@SuperMouse I agree! These people fail at marketing. If they invested the time it takes to create even one profile in looking at how this site works, they would know that no one will even see these profiles unless looking for spambots.

Thank you for your work keeping the site clean, @SuperMouse. I had no idea we were hit by that much spam on a daily basis!!!!
Although, ya know, the Wiccan priestess’ love spells might do a hefty business here, what with the plethora of teenage love questions…

@bookish1 I might have clicked on the Wiccan priestess’s website before I banner her.

Everytime this post appears in my activity for you page (and I know it is from @Symbeline) I keep hoping it will have an (NSFW) in the heading.

a Wiccan priestess offering love spells.

wat

lol

@SuperMouse, it’s been my guess (based probably on too little real knowledge) that those profile spams—especially the ones that appear to be nothing but random patchworks of phrases, sometimes hilarious—are not placed by the merchants at all. I’ve supposed they were placements by some sort of dodgy SEO service that’s charging clients money for it while the clients don’t really know where their ads are going or what they look like. When I see a legit business such as Home Decorators promoted that way, I have to think they didn’t knowingly do it themselves.

I think maybe such outfits can sell their SEO services this way because it may not matter if anyone sees the profiles. Page-ranking algorithms such as Google’s treat as significant factors not the number of views but the number of sites where your links appear and the ranks that those sites have, so the point is to get your links out there in order to raise where you stand in a list of Google search hits.

Maybe someone who knows a bit more than I do about this aspect of online marketing can correct or elaborate on this explanation.

@Jeruba Good call. This just brings home yet again the sheer emptiness of this kind of marketing, and the pointlessness of the Google algorithm.

@Jeruba that theory makes perfect sense and it is supported by the fact that sometimes there are several different and totally unrelated businesses on the same IP.

@SuperMouse has been a spam-killing machine for the last couple of days!

I suggest we change @SuperMouses’ nom-de-plum to @Terminator!

@Symbeline Yes, fuck Nascar. LOL