How do spammers find this website?

I’ve looked at obvious spammer names when they pop up in the feed, and i often see from their profiles that they answer really old questions. The questions are usually like an opportunity for whatever they are spamming about. So I think they must get a hit on the content that brings them here and then they try for more attention.

How did you find this website, @Mimishu1995?

I also wonder about brand new users like this one who promptly follow someone that hasn’t been here in 8 years.

@kneesox I was trying to find a replacement for Y!A because my experience there wasn’t positive. I typed “best Q&A website”, and in one thread of a website I found someone mentioning this site.

But then again I think that was before the thing with Google.

I think they must get a hit on the content that brings them here and then they try for more attention.

That explains the spammers who answer and possibly ask questions. But that doesn’t explain the ones who just put spammy things on their usernames and profiles and do nothing afterwards. How do they know this website exists? And why don’t they come into any questions to make themselves known?

It’s possible to find Fluther pages on Google using searches.

My guess-timate is the spammers that tend to show up here tend to be using some sort of automated spam program that either uses Google, or lists of web sites probably generated by something that crawls the Internet one way or another and auto-creates accounts and posts spam, auto-detecting the join and ask question buttons. The user just puts in some spam phrases and the program assaults tens of thousands of sites with the bot automatically.

But it’s just programmed to create an account, and post a handful of questions and answers.

@Mimishu1995 Here, for instance, is a brand new user who immediately asked kind of a weird question. And then right afterward followed just one person, someone who hasn’t been here in 8 years. So I can’t help wondering: is this genuine or not?

As for some of those spam posts, I think they’re made by people who are getting paid to post URLs somewhere where there is traffic, and whatever pennies they get for posting here must be worth the trouble. I don’t think they care if it gets taken down right away as long as they make their numbers. Maybe this isn’t how it works, but I remember reading about this kind of enterprise and I connected it with what I’ve seen here.

@kneesox

There have been some rather eccentric users here.

There’s one active member who only posts responses to questions that they’ve posted.

There’s another one who joined, posted once, and followed only me.
I still have no idea who she is, and I’ve never interacted with her. ;-o

There’s another one who was banned for using an alternate account to self-lurve.
You’d think someone that concerned about accumulating lurve would realize that the #1 rule to lurve accumulation is, don’t get banned!