You might be wondering about the spambots and what the hell they are doing posting on our little (and quite new) community forums. Specifically, you might be wondering why they are posting gibberish. Well, allow me to explain!
It helps to understand how Google's search algorithm works, but essentially they are
Google bombing for websites who provide page rank improvement services. People pay these websites to improve their site ranks, and they accomplish it by Google bombing helpless websites to falsely manipulate the search results. It is because of this bullshit that spam bots exist.
The gist of the Google's search algorithm is that it is all designed around the premise of peer verification. Forgetting any possibility of artificial tampering, it is reasonable to believe that someone linking to another website from their own website is, in some respects, expressing a vote of confidence in support of the linked to website. The page ranking is based on this reasoning; the more links to your website that Google encounters on all its other websites, the higher your page will rank. For example, by linking to the Wikipedia page 'Google bomb' above with the phrase "Google bombing" as the link text, I have increased the page rank of Wikipedia article whenever someone searches for "Google bombing", "Google bomb" or "Google bombed" (Google is programmed to recognize language inflections as equivalent).
In order to protect the value of these results, Google also factors in the page rank of the site that is being linked from when valuing the page rank of the target. This might seem cyclical, but if you think of it as occurring in iterative steps from a base of valued sites long ago, this system works. This stops people from setting up website that do nothing but link to other websites to develop page rankings for them, since no one would ever have a reason to link back to that website. However, this forces people who want to manipulate the results to make use of established reputable websites. That's why people write spambots. In turn, that's why Captcha systems exist. In turn again, that's why spam bot programmers have been combing through forum code looking for security holes to bypass the Captcha system. And in turn yet again, that's why forum developers have to keep issuing security patches.
So, it seems that yesterday a spambot scouted our site with that "hi i'm new here" post, and today they are spamming the shit out of us. For now, this leaves me to clean up the forum every time they post.
Speaking of which, when spambots post to the forum, I will just respond by deleting the thread and the account as soon as I can. Be warned that I will delete the whole thread, even if it has posts in it by other people. So, feel free to post in them if you want and make fun of the spambot messages or whatever, but unless something truely awesome comes out of it, I will delete the thread anyway. You might be better to create your own thread to discuss something.
Yesterday I tried to find a Captcha system for our site. I even installed one, but it doesn't seem to work. I'll keep at it, as I want to close up this hole.
To be honest, when I set up the site, I noticed how easy it would be for spambots to register with Joomla. I guess so did the spambots.
There is good news out of all of this, though - the spambots themselves find websites by running search queries in Google, then they value the higher ranked ones over the lower ranked ones for the aforementioned reasons. So, at least this means we are already ranking well in Google search results.
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