Please upgrade here. These earlier versions are no longer being updated and have security issues.
HackerOne users: Testing against this community violates our program's Terms of Service and will result in your bounty being denied.

Suspicious user with hundreds of Vanilla accounts

edited May 2010 in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8
Hi.

Does anybody know jamesturner125 or have any idea why this user would be signed up to hundreds of Vanilla installs, leaving a comment or two on each of them?

This looks pretty suspicious.

Comments

  • User Jamesturner125 turns out to be a spammer who promotes sites such as playonlinepokies.co.nz and onlinepokiegames.com.au. The links are colored white, which renders them invisible against a white background.

    Here's an example of such spam. Here's another.
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    That's crazy. I've banned him here. The RC has the ability to delete spammers (and all of their content). Will wipe him out once we push RC onto the community forum.
  • Here's a black spam link against a black background

    More white on white, more, more, more, more, more, more.

    All of this stuff must be hand-crafted, as the comments that accompany the spam links actually fit into the discussion threads.

    It's been going on for a couple of months, too.
  • LincLinc Detroit Admin
    The funny thing is how pointless it is. Google takes page/text color into account in its rankings; that's an old trick it already knows.

    I've been banning more overt spammers lately too.
  • Yahoo returns zero inlinks for playonlinepokies.co.nz and zero inlinks for onlinepokiegames.com.au, so yes, it's pointless.

    It seemed a bit more sinister as Jamesturner125 apparently targets Vanilla exclusively, but it's likely to be the handiwork of a bumbling amateur.
  • LincLinc Detroit Admin
    Other forum software tends to use BBCode, which generally won't let you override link color.
Sign In or Register to comment.