/tg/Station 13

These spamverts for dating sites, Nike shoes, Ect.

These spammer do it because they think it advertises their site when spiders crawl on the site (doesn't work, Google stopped this eons ago). Unfortunately if anyone searches anything along those lines, it does bring the spammed site with it.

I would suggest instead of simply locking/archiving the threads, I suggest active measures to prevent crawlers from accessing archives, and editing the post content to have something other than the spammed content.

This will squash out their attempts to boost SEO for their spam sites, and prevent tgstation from showing up when these spamverts get searched.

This is the wrong subforum for this. Policy discussion is for game related rules. Moving to the website subforum.

wilco understood. forgot this section existed.

Yeah this'll show them automated spambots who's the boss

Shaps wrote:Yeah this'll show them automated spambots who's the boss

I suggested this because these spammers know they'll be banned ect, but they do so because they believe it will also boost their site's SEO and exposure. By editing the field to something else, you're denying them that.

Shame the bots probably use throwaway emails. It would be fun to reply "AI, door" to them.
Even better if we got the contact info of the creators. Send them messages about how their bot is malf/rogue piece of shit and ignoring door requests.

You mean I can't buy Tramadol here?

I wonder how good the shoes are

shoeposters are the best posters on these forums if you don't think so you can get out

They can only post in ban appeals I think, because most of them don't have a registered byond account.

Extending the byond account linking requirement to all forums will end the spam completely but might confuse people trying to appeal a ban on our forums.

I wouldn't recommend changing the robots.txt to mess with the bots either. A lot of serveradmins rely on a simple google search to find bans.

Spiders can not access the deleted/archived section.

wonderful.

Ya I thought about that myself some time ago and blocked them from that subsection, I think I also blocked them from profile viewing to keep forum accounts with a website link in their profile from showing up to google and helping their rankings (Also because having that spam visible to google would massively hurt OUR rankings)

isn't there any way to just hard delete them so they don't show up in new posts?

Yup, some of the guys I've worked with from other communities and websites had this sort of problem that was harming their SEO. What they did was edit the body of the message to something promoting the site and it would catch SEO with buzzwords because the spider would crawl and read the newly edited message. This would actually increase SEO in many cases.

For example this is a replacement message; Now once a spider crawls this, anyone searching for an "open source code base", "space station 13 community", or a "gaming community responsive admins" would potentially be directed here.

You can't trick web development google algorithms

Actually from my experience, it has actually attracted higher SEO, and I can confirm that several players have joined a community over the words they searched.

Whilst it isn't a major difference, it's also a safety measure in case someone accidentally clicks on those links. And it looks better.

Generally i go thru every now and then and just delete their account and posts.

J_Madison wrote:Actually from my experience, it has actually attracted higher SEO, and I can confirm that several players have joined a community over the words they searched.

Whilst it isn't a major difference, it's also a safety measure in case someone accidentally clicks on those links. And it looks better.

Sorry to say but you are wrong.

Fucking oranges and j_mad took the bait on a spambot just now, KEK. That one was pretty clever actually.

what did he mean by this?

Our good advice to someone potentially getting themselves in for a felony for misuse of jammers was for nought as the person we addressed was an automated script, oranges.

Link it, I wanna see

Spamverts = spamming reverts to goofcode?

i feel like we are not far off from the day when spamscripts begin to reliably pass turing tests