It is money -- they're getting paid for "SEO", or promoting certain sites on Google, in other words. One way to do that is to get lots of links to the site with the right keywords in the link text from other reputable sites. Forums and blog comments are a popular target. A script that creates users and posts messages with links on a certain vBulletin version will work on a multitude of forums, making them a high-gain target. Forum software gets updated often plugging security holes that allow such automated spam. Looks like the version we're using here was released in 2006, I'm surprised it held so long, really.

In october we had 218 active members we now have 626. Is this 408 extras all the work of spammers:eek: :eek:

http://www.haynes.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=8585

Just looked again as of today its 713. They are busy boys

Bob

Everytime I look here you can see someone registering

http://www.haynes.co.uk/forums/online.php

Hopefully the current actions will slow them down and maybe they'l give up

The active users is up to 725 from about 240

800 now:eek: :eek: and still rising. Mods will have knocked out the best part of 600 of them by end of play today and thats not including their posts.

Bob:(

a lot of extra work and inconvenience caused by some complete twat's :mad:

Language !!! ;)


Please do remember this is a public forum supplied by haynes and even thought these BOTS are causing me and Ash a lot of extra work we should refere to them with family friendly terms.


Taaaars

TT

My apologies, quite rightly told off, i'm sat on my naughty stair for 10 mins :o Its just the senselessness of it that so frustrating :(

your a dad of 7..

You can't be 10 years old, surely you know it's 1 minuet for every year of your age...


Frustrating,,,yeah,, when your an I.T. professional it's more of a cat and mouse game. you just have to make sure your either the cat... or your Jerry ;)

TT

OMG YOU MEAN I GO TO SIT HERE FOR 43 MINUTES! ARE YOU SERIOUS :eek:

lol lol

Yes I am a full time dad of 7 now, however up until just over three years ago I worked in the IT industry for 17 years, cabling/fibre engineer moving on to PBX engineer and converged networks (Avaya & Mitel), wireless implementation and then project management. Life situations change and so here I am . . .

Oh, prior to that I served my mechanics apprenticeship and then worked a couple of years in the body shop.

Although I have no experience of forum software I do understand the complexities surrounding the issue, its easy just to think its a technical thing but I do realise there's a whole bundle of politics surrounding it unfortunately.

All the best TT

Bruce

PS my little one starts school full time in September so hopefully I'l get back on track career wise :)