Suspicious user with hundreds of Vanilla accounts

Geronimo

Hi.

Does anybody know jamesturner125 or have any idea why this user would be signed up to hundreds of Vanilla installs, leaving a comment or two on each of them?

This looks pretty suspicious.

Geronimo

User Jamesturner125 turns out to be a spammer who promotes sites such as playonlinepokies.co.nz and onlinepokiegames.com.au. The links are colored white, which renders them invisible against a white background.

Here's an example of such spam. Here's another.

Mark

That's crazy. I've banned him here. The RC has the ability to delete spammers (and all of their content). Will wipe him out once we push RC onto the community forum.

Geronimo

Here's a black spam link against a black background

More white on white, more, more, more, more, more, more.

All of this stuff must be hand-crafted, as the comments that accompany the spam links actually fit into the discussion threads.

It's been going on for a couple of months, too.

Linc

The funny thing is how pointless it is. Google takes page/text color into account in its rankings; that's an old trick it already knows.

I've been banning more overt spammers lately too.

Geronimo

Yahoo returns zero inlinks for playonlinepokies.co.nz and zero inlinks for onlinepokiegames.com.au, so yes, it's pointless.

It seemed a bit more sinister as Jamesturner125 apparently targets Vanilla exclusively, but it's likely to be the handiwork of a bumbling amateur.

Linc

Other forum software tends to use BBCode, which generally won't let you override link color.