Hey Guys,
Just went through some of my members and discovered some interesting patterns that helped me remove a bunch of spammers, here's my suggestions and tips from the experience.
PREVENTION
Tip #1: DO NOT have contests that involve only people who are members. I ran a few photo contests and discovered that a ton of members existed only to vote for their friend and then were never back on again, they likely aren't even interested in what the site is about. So find an alternative for contests. Perhaps pick the finalists yourself and then use a poll from http://www.polldaddy.com to allow anyone to submit a vote for the winner.
Tip #2: Use the Captcha, have specific profile questions and make uploading a photo mandatory.
FINDING SPAMMERS: Browsing members and finding discrepancies
Look for any of the following:
- Photos opposite to the gender listed.
- Photos that are TOO NICE, they are likely stock photos. One's with a clean profile image that is crisp or has a white or out of focus background. Over time, you'll get an eye for catching these types of profile pictures.
- Photos that aren't of people. Products, plants, etc.
- Members from New York. A lot of spammers use this as their location.
- If your site is somewhat gendered (i.e. mostly men or mostly women) you can search the least common gender and will often find spammers in there.
- Look for common profile question mistakes that spammers make, for example I have a question like "who is your hoop mamma or papa?" which means, "who got you interested in this hobby?" and spammers will often answer with Mamma or Papa because they think it is a choice between the two. Once you find common mistake answers, do an advanced search for that answer and you'll find a whack of spammers.
What are your tips and suggestions for tracking down spammers?
Replies
"tell you later" or something similar is also quite frequently seen in profile question answers. Another dead giveaway. (And besides, who needs members who can't be bothered with answering some simple questions?)
By the way, your tip #1 is technically not about spammers, if I understand you correctly. This is more about members who create additional fake profiles to vote themselves or their friends up. But technically or not, a pox on both fakes and spammers....
I ran a photo contest which worked well by the members having to submit their photo's to me by email, I then renamed them 1,2,3 etc and placed them then in an album on my page. A link was created to the album and then members voted by using the like button. As the photos had no details who they where by and the like button not allowing more than 1 like for that member it worked out really well. You can then see if anyone has joined just to vote as they will have a blank profile but a like on a photo. Im just about to start a new competition to win a camera and am going to use the paid access feature for the page, so any member who wants to enter must pay a fixed price each time, this will help keep the 'spammers' out of the competition. The payment will be split 50% to half for a charity and the other to help build revenue for the running of the site itself. Hope this helped in anyway for your future comps.