   How do i report spam?
  How do i report spam?I got a msg from candyman99. I cant tell if it was a spambot or not, especially since he has registered in 2007. His profilehttp://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/profile.asp?mode=display&id=120245The message in question is below msg_id=110855Hey I found this site that you can get money on and you could use the money to hire people for working on your games and making graphics or use it for what ever you want to use it for. The site has no minimum payout and credits offers really fast. So far I made $70 in 3 days so I am going to use that money for hiring people for my games but if you are interested the website is [link removed] Just wanted to help out if I can since I am not very good at coding for games or doing graphics.[Mod edit: Don't want the link to gain unnecessary pagerank, now do we.][Edited by - Promit on June 21, 2009 10:47:03 PM]
  Contact a moderator or staff member using the PM system. He registered in 2007 but hasn't posted since. Looks like spam to me.// edit - he's been banned - double banned actually (meaning that another mod banned him right before I banned him - there's nothing special about that but he won't get a sympathetic ear if he begs to be let back in).   ;  The best way to deal with spam is to give them what they ask for, traffic.Run wget -r on the advertised site over night, preferrably from a script which fires up 5-6 instances in parallel. This is more effective than any other measure. Feel free to add 8-10 kilobytes of user agent string to the request, most webservers will happily write those 10 kB to the logfile for every request.Spam works because it doesn't cost anything (or nearly so), therefore if you only make 5 dollars out of it, you already win. Usually there is no way to prevent spam, nor to get hold of the people doing it in any way.However, you can can get hold of the people who hire the spammers (obviously, since they must tell you their website), and you can make spam much more expensive for them. You can also make it much less lucrative for hosting companies to have clients that employ spam, both because of bandwidth and maintenance.If spam sites persistently cost the hosting companies much more than they get for the "all inclusive" packets, the hosting companies will be likely to cancel these contracts. On the other hand, if the spam sites pay for bandwidth, then every spam mail you "answer" in this way costs real money.If only a few thousand people do this, spam very quickly becomes unattractive, because it now costs more than it's worth.   ;  Now this is an interesting idea! Generating just 1Mbps of traffic for 8 hours results in 3.6GB of overnight traffic. If ten people do this for a few days, the costs for the operator will soon become prohibitive (or the ISP will be forced to shut them down).Unfortunately, this could be categorized as a DOS attack, which is usually prohibited by ISPs...   ;  Neat idea samoth ;)Though yes, running that in parallel is a DOS attack, which could land you in trouble as well.Quote:Original post by FiddlerGenerating just 1Mbps of traffic for 8 hours results in ......results in using up 16% of my monthly download quota :/ (until recently it would have been 90%!)   ;  I would think it's very likely there are vigilante anti-spam groups who have set up systems to do exactly this, maybe allowing you to submit spam URLs. Of course it's shady legally...   ;Quote:Original post by HodgmanNeat idea samoth ;)Though yes, running that in parallel is a DOS attack, which could land you in trouble as well.Quote:Original post by FiddlerGenerating just 1Mbps of traffic for 8 hours results in ......results in using up 16% of my monthly download quota :/ (until recently it would have been 90%!)Wow, 5GB traffic per month? That's... bad. I routinely generate such amounts in a single day (not even torrenting - that's what you get with unmetered 20Mbps!) How can such limits survive in a free market?   