How to identify spam (1 Viewer)

[Jon]

Follow this and you will catch most of it:

1. Promoting a website on first post. This is ALWAYS spam and should be deleted.
2. Check IP address location. Places like Russia, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, China have very high probability of spam. If the country is poor, the spam incidence is high.
3. Posts talking about Access data recovery software by new members is spam.
4. First posts, or only posts are non-Access related.
5. Any of their messages promoted a site name (without dropping a link) with hardly any traffic. How do they even know this site exists to mention it? Spot them by using SimilarWeb Chrome plugin or just go to SimilarWeb website to get traffic stats. If their site is not on there, it is low traffic. If the site mentioned is a well known site, this rule does not apply.
6. Mention an external site but without a link, but then later edit their post and turn the mentioned site into an actual link. If this happens, you can click the HIstory button on the post and see the before and after versions of the post. (Not sure if regular users get to see the History link. Can a regular user let me know?)
7. Having the same IP address as other members. Under Moderator tools, there is a Shared IP button listing any other members that have the same IP address. Be careful with this one and use common sense, because a legitimate members account may have been hacked by the spammer. (Moderator tools only visble to moderators)
8. Having multiple IP addresses from different world locations. e.g. USA, Ukraine, India all from the same member. It could be a dynamic IP address, but mostly they are confined to the same region. If you are already checking them for potential spam and they have this red flag, it adds to your confidence that they are a spammer.
9. If you click their IP address, the page it sends you to has a "Click to check Blacklist Status" button where you can check to see if they have a history of being blacklisted for spam.
10. Messages promoting pills, access data recovery, medical marijuana, job adverts, blogs, websites etc.
11. New members replying to old threads, particularly non-Access ones.
12. Posting random messages that don't seem to fit the forum thread.
13. New members who get to 10 forum posts and then stop. They just want to meet the criteria to drop links either on their next post, or edit previous messages. If they are technical Access posts, this does not apply.

Identifying footprints
To catch some of these spammers, you can pick out what look like unique phrases in their message. Then paste into Google and add quotes around the message, so Google goes for an exact match. This often reveals other places they have spammed, so you can confirm that they are spammers.

Examples of footprints in my bullet list above:

1. "Places like Russia, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, China have very high probability of spam." - probability of uniqueness low because the phrase has a specific order of country names.

2. "First posts, or only posts are non-Access related." - unlikely to have many places using the term "non-Access" and "posts" in the same sentence

Another footprint is the spammers username. Google it and see if it reveals other places they have posted.

Golden Rule: If there is a faintest whiff of spam, it almost certainly is with 99% probability.

If you spot what you think might be spam on the forums, click the Report button. We catch most of it pretty quickly.