Best Spam Drop Ever in a Forum

[seobook]

whats the best you have ever seen :D

[Jill Whalen]

None. They all suck.

[seobook]

what I meant by best is most covert most interesting least noticable most effective etc etc etc

[Marketing Guy]

One word - Googleguy! ;)

I'd give my right arm to have his ability to freely promote my services on top industry forums! :)

MG

[Gurtie]

lol - as opposed to YahooRep who signed up but never got around to posting?

I personally quite liked FarmerTom, who at least did the humour thing and came back to answer questions, but my favourites are always the tag teams.

[Marketing Guy]

Some "tag teams" are so funny. I swear these people have the strangest opinion of what a "natural" conversation is like on a forum! ;)

New user 1: Hey does anyone know where I can buy widgets?
New user 2 (same IP, posts 3 minutes later on your forum that gets 3 posts per week): I used Bob's Widgets, 123 Any St, Anytown, blah blah
New user 1 (next day): Wow I used them and they were really great!

Give me a break! Note to spammers - noone actually ever registers on a forum just to say "hey guys, I just found this great widget that I thought might be useful to you all...."! :rolleyes:

Or the alternate version where the tag team are actually slagging off the competition? That one's brilliant! ;)

We had a competitor pose as a "client" and slag us off on a forum (anon obviously! ;)). What he failed to take into account was that the sheer level of industry knowledge he displayed trying to slag us off flagged him instantly as a competitor and made a complete mockery of what he was trying to say (which was completely unjustified nonsense anyway!).

/MG

[randfish]

Ha ha! That's terrific MG.

The ones that are most effective are the ones who answer questions and manage to fit in a promotion. I've even done it on occassion, but since I'm not making any $$ off it, it's a bit different.

Some of these guys, however, simply crawl dozens of forums for questions that are even slightly related to their stuff and then post in them. It only starts to feel truly slimy when you visit 3 or 4 of your favorite forums and see the same guy plugging the same stuff.

Good tactic, though, and often goes un-noticed.

[Marketing Guy]

I will be honest and say I don't mind people coming to my forums to self-promote - IF they contribute some quality posts. I thinking trying to completely shun self-promotion is a never-ending hassle, particularly if the spammers are persistant.

Another point to consider is that our perception of what "spam" is, will generally not be shared by the regular Joe Surfer. Sometimes, a "spam" post may actually be relevant to users! It's just the bare faced cheek of some people that gets me!

One guy came to one of my forums and replied to a handful of threads, "Hey I just found this site and I thought...blah blah blah" so I asked him not to, then got bored and banned him after he did it again. So I go to his site and find his forums - he's copied my layout (forum topics, etc), and my forum descriptions (some of them even refered to another forum within my site which he hadn't copied!!). How cheeky is that?

The best bit is that a day or two after I email him asking to remove the content he copied, one of my moderators posted an email he got from him asking him to moderate on his forums!!

It's funny though when this stuff goes bad and ends up making them look like idiots - I remember a few years ago on WmW when a guy was tag team spamming about a SEO related product - the discussion was plausable and was allowed to progress for a few pages. Until someone (one of the mods I think) did some outstanding detective work with email addresses, profile domains, domain name registration info, phone numbers, etc etc etc and it turned out to be the one person (or two people from the same company) flaming each other to keep the discussion open! :rolleyes:

Fair play it was a fairly subtle move, but clearly an outrageous publicity screw up when the tide was turned and they were outed!

Slightly off topic but I play a MMO where a middle age guy was publicy outed on a forum after TWO YEARS of pretending to be a teenage girl (and making out some dreadful lies like getting pregnant then losing the baby, etc etc - really awful stuff). If you think IT forums can get a bit heated, you've seen nothing compared to the wrath of gaming forums! ;)

Lying on the Internet only ends in pain ladies and gents! :cool:

/MG