Site Reference Forums

As probably many of you have noticed, there has been an influx of suspicious posts and members on SR as of late

Thanks to several diligent members here, we were able to start putting pieces of the puzzle together

After some more research I was able to pinpoint 15 members who were responsible for spamming our community as part of this little "spam circle" – all have been banned

These members shared many common characteristics:

> Quality of Posts: most were vague, duplicates from other forums, plagiarized, etc
> Links in Signature Panel: these often were contrary to their posts. For example they promoted SEO services and were asking vary basic SEO questions
> IP Addresses: all were from similar IP addresses or within a certain tight range
> Domain Registrar: all had their sites registered at GoDaddy
> NameServers: all their sites were hosted on the same nameserver: BlueBPO
> Gmail: all used @Gmail.com addresses to register with the forums
> Other more in depth similarities which I won’t reveal as to not give (the best tracking parts) away to any spammer that may be reading this

None of those items alone are an indication that these members were working in cahoots (if it indeed was several people and not the same person using multiple accounts), but when combined the picture became clear

Therefore I have taken several steps:

> As mentioned I have banned all 15 members
> blocked the source from accessing any sites on our server
> I have added new rules and actions such as plagiarism, duplicate postings from other forums and multiple accounts will not be tolerated 
> Have asked Waveshoppe, Northie and MarkCCDC to become administrators which will allow them to deal directly with inappropriate posts/members
> Have deleted all posts from the banned members in order to clean-up the boards- I apologize if this affects any contributions any members here have made but there were too many to leave as is

There are a great number of ways in which you can draw targeted traffic to a website, so it’s unfortunate to see people using their precious time spamming a forum (which is one of the least effective). If instead they had read the information provided here by all our members and participated properly they would have learned legitimate tactics that are far more valuable and produce much better results then their spamming.

In any case, I am writing this to let everyone know what has occurred, as after all this is your community. I want to thank everyone for helping out in this matter > means a lot to see so many people take action and pitch in

Lastly to any of the banned spammers > I have more info about you than you probably know exists. There are few places to hide on the net. You tried, you failed; change your tactics to productive, legitimate marketing. I, on the other hand, have better things to do than take revenge but if you don’t change your course, I assure you, you won’t like where this ends up. Enough said…