There seems to be a rather nasty spamrun taking place on many .edu sites hosting forums at the moment. Filtering out lurid trackback spam and genuine .Edu articles about pornography in various search engines reveals pages and pages of forum spam, dubious keywords and sites that currently look like this:
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As you can imagine, the shot above is one of the tamer spamruns.
Elsewhere, you have the kind of pages that induce headaches for bloggers hovering their fingers over the “blank this out” key:
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Notice that 45 people have hit the “Like” button – I’m hoping those are spam accounts and not regular forum users.
Most of this seems to have kicked in since around the 4th or 5th of February, and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of spam control or preventative measures going on right now so please be careful if looking around your University forums, official or otherwise. While not everything in the below screenshot is related to this spamrun, it should give you an idea of the kinds of things in circulation:
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The sites currently being targeted desperately need to take control of the situation – if things continue as they are, I can’t imagine many users being persuaded to stick around…
Christopher Boyd