Technical support is difficult to come by these days. Whether by chat, email, or call center, the product manufacturer is more than likely overwhelmed with the amount of individuals needing support and cannot keep up with the demand. To aid in the support of those who use the manufacturer’s products, one answer is a community forum.
The community forum is typically supported by those users who have skills in a specific area, or have encountered a similar problem before and can provide support to their peers. Intel community forums also provide skilled support staff and engineers who provide support for their products.
Again, technical support is difficult to come by. Making matters worse are those who only use the forum for their own selfish gain. These are the spammers who will flood the forum with hundreds of posts, typically adult content or streaming sports. They make money by posting their spam – the more posts, the more money. They make money for every link that is clicked on. Clicking the link is mostly done by the curious. However, for those to which the link content appeals, the spammer also makes money.
The spammer uses community forums, typically provided by large companies because of the volume of users who visit these forums, to advertise for free. By flooding the forum with their spam, typically when there is limited or no moderator support available, the spammer accomplishes two things. First, he gets his spam visible to everyone who visits that forum. Then, even when the spam is deleted, it is still cached on search engines. Anyone who searches for such content will get thousands of hits, again allowing the spammer to profit.
Back to my opening statement – support is difficult to get. When the support community spammed, it makes it far more difficult for the user who needs support, having to wade through hundreds of spam posts, to find an answer or have their post seen by others who might be able to provide support. The spammer has absolutely no regard or respect for those who use the forum for its intended purpose. Rather, the spammer is self-absorbed and single-minded, concerned with only himself.
The spammer needs no email list by posting on forums which attract traffic for those in need of support. It costs him little or nothing to post his spam. He has exactly what he needs – a heavily trafficked forum with worldwide visibility, and he selfishly uses this resource with only his needs in mind.
Not much can be done to stop the spammer. Various tools exist, but they are not without side-effects. Putting the forum into lockdown or moderation mode stops the spammer, but affects the user who has done nothing wrong, and prohibits them from getting timely support. Trapping or intercepting on keywords has limited success. Disabling or deactivating a spammer also has limited impact, as they simply rejoin the forum with a different name/email address. All of you have seen the keyboard-mashed user names. That is a clear sign of a spammer. And, it is not cost-effective for the forum provider to employ full-time moderators.
I have focused on those spammers who flood the forum with adult and sport content. There are other spammers, who typically post a link to their product once or twice. Those spammers are simply a nuisance. Adult and sport content are close to illegal, if not completely illegal, in my opinion, especially with concern for copyrighted material. However, the spammer does not care. To get to the actual content, these spammers have created a system of “jumps” from site to site to site before one actually gets to the content. When one site blocks or takes down their links, the spammer uses another site. The concern is only to throw their spam in your face and, hopefully, have you click on it.
It would be of tremendous help if the forum users would not click on the links, or call the numbers. However, curiosity cannot be stopped. But, if there were no clicks, or calls, that would help. The goal for the spammer is to have their “advertising” visible to all. The web user who has no interest in support from a community forum will still find the content they desire using any of the search engines. Even when the spam is deleted, as I said previously, it is still found on the search provider’s cached pages.
The psychology is the spammer is different from that of an individual with morals and principles. Many spammers see nothing wrong with what they do. In fact, they consider it a job. The more they post, the more they get paid. The entire philosophy of the spammer is monetary gain. Using other’s resources is of no concern to them. In its simplest form, they are thieves, who steal and misuse that which others provide. And that is a crime.
My advice to the forum user is to report spam whenever they see it. It helps the moderators by allowing them to remove the spam more quickly.
My advice to the spammer is to seek professional therapy at their earliest convenience.
Doc