Damn! And to think I was just going to petition the Gods to have my nick changed to "Free Online Car Insurance Quote".

A few months back, tye and other sundry devils sorted things out to make Perlmonks crawlable by search engine spiders. Hypothesis: this has caused the site to come up on the radar of spammers, who are wont to go after anything resembling a blog or a forum and try and scam a free lift. We never saw this before because the only way people found out about Perlmonks was, literally, by word of mouth.

If I'm right, we will unfortunately be seeing a lot more of this sort of crap.

Following my curiosity, I rechecked the registration form because I have a mixed memory about using CAPTCHA. And there's no CAPTCHA there. Now I remember that this memory mixing is because at the same time I registered at PM, I registered at other services. Some of them using CAPTCHA.

because the only way people found out about Perlmonks was, literally, by word of mouth

There's a direct link to Perl Monks from http://www.perl.org, right there on the front page. And I believe this is not the only one, now and later.

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Update: added note about link on Perl.org

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Open source softwares? Share and enjoy. Make profit from them if you can. Yet, share and enjoy!

And don't forget Cheap Car Insurance Quote, Sprint Pcs Ringtones, and Car Insurance Dallas.

And then there's Aldara, Synalar, Vicodin, Zyban, Xenical, Triphasil, Methylparoben, buy phentermine online, buy tramadol online, and so on.

I for one find it hilarious that anyone thinks they can make money via advertising in the form of a spammish username on PerlMonks.

You also have to wonder about usernames such as: Dixie Kimberly Kathy Gloria Howard Peggy Cory Heather Emily Kylan Lionel Chad Ann Joan Monica Irene Sally Dennis Lane Conchita Hernan Jane Betty Janet Carl Mary John Sherry Phyllis Caleb Joy Justin etc., which tend to get created in batches and are clearly bogus. The question is, Why? What is the possible benefit to anyone in creating these accounts? Are they simply name squatting? Even in that, I don't see any advantage. It's not like those are brand names.

Bottom line, there's not much harm in these fake users, other than bloating the database with useless records.

There's no reason "why," in the way you want to think about it.

There are some incredibly complicated bots out there that do various complicated things to acquire accounts and post things automatically. I don't believe humans interact with them in anyway — beyond updating the spam database.

I have one contact form that spammers regularly use to send me single words. "Carss" [sic] was popular last week. Who knows why. They can't put URLs in the contact form at all... that clearly has something to do with it.

Anyway, the reason it seems so stupid is because the spammer likely has no idea they're hitting this site at all ... and they don't even care. Nor would they notice if "we" somehow blocked all the messages in the first place.

One thing that might help a little is if there was no way to post anchor tags or URLs at all unless they were in the proper [href://|lol!]] markup. It's unlikely the botnet operator(s) would go through the trouble of learning that markup since it wouldn't do any good anyway.

We would definitely still get the random word spam from the bots, but it'd be somewhat less common.

-Paul

And, last I heard, they didn't even bother to register the names in a way that they'll ever be able to use them. Just because you haven't figured out whether it will work doesn't mean you should wait before kicking off a big batch of spamming, I guess.

- tye        

Anyone with a "contact us" form on their website knows what's going on with these.

They stuff fields that look like a "contact us" or a "post an anonymous message" and fill them with assorted different markups (including html tags and bbcode) in the hope that their spam message will appear on your forums for a couple of hours until an admin deltes it.

i'm not sure why they don't see the anonymonk post form, but I would have expected to see them posting a lot more replies as anonymonk offering \|iaqra, molex watches and Soft tabs tha make you f33l like a m4n

*twitch* not that I'm bitter about that

@_=qw; ask f00li5h to appear and remain for a moment of pretend better than a lifetime;;s;;@_[map hex,split'',B204316D8C2A4516DE];;y/05/os/&print;

Goes right along with spam I occasionally get that looks as if the sc^Hpammer forgot to run something and sends out their template.

--MidLifeXis

I don't know whether that's just me or not, but the spam that we receive has significantly increased since I registered (so I may be wrong or not taking in consideration the short timespan I've been allowed to be a part of this community).

But whether and how to approach such devastating attempts is left upon decisions by the Janitors.

And yes, of course, I noticed.

Aha...it's now your fault...

I'm quite glad that you've volunteered to be the official scapegoat. It's quite an honor, and one I'm glad you've undertaken.

emc

Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world.

—Mary Shafer, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center

No, it's spam. SPAM is a meat product from Hormel Foods Corporation.

(I'd link to their website, but it's got annoying flash or something that starts talking)

But a can of SPAM and a #10 can Campbell Baked Beans was a staple in college, and in my first few years of marriage!

Chop up the SPAM into .5" chunks, dump into crock pot, add beans, .5 Cup Ketchup, .25 teaspoon Onion Powder, .5 Cup Brown Sugar:

Its A Meal (r). ;-)