Links to spam sites with empty text
-
Sometimes we get spam. It's always caught by our post queue because we're a relatively small community and new registrants always get their submissions queued for approval.
Almost always it's obvious. Either it's just a plain ad, or tons of word salad... more recently it's AI generated crap which all sounds the same.
This week we're starting to see posts come on with innocuous content, like "me too" posts with slightly more content. What did surprise me was that they contained hidden links. Up until now I was seeing actual text hyperlinked, so they turned blue. With no actual anchor text, the anchor still exists, but is just invisible.
So I think a good next step here is replacing all links with empty anchors with a bright red
hidden linkelement. -
@julian Would it be an idea to put some examples (redacted to protect the innocent^wguilty) into a github repo (or blogpost, or whatever) so there is a corpus of things to test against/watch out for?
-
@[email protected] there's nothing in the text itself that sets off red flags. Using pre-existing user-generated content to pass cursory checks has been just one tool in a spammer's toolbelt.
The link-hiding is a new one, at least for me, but I of course don't see the whole gamut of spammer behaviour.
