Originally Posted by Bocajnala

I think what most of us don't understand....

And yes, as mods we've had this discussion multiple times with admin over the past year or more....

Why are all the spammers signing up? They have to be generating revenue somewhere... Either for themselves, or for HNI. Someone is making money off these spammers somehow . Otherwise they wouldn't exist. Nobody is creating these accounts for free . Nobody is creating programs to create these fake accounts for free. Someone is getting paid somewhere due to these accounts.

Spammers show up everywhere on the Internet. They were here in years past when HN was busier. They are here now. It's a fact of life, especially for forums. Why are they here? Because the Internet. And yes, the accounts cost literally nothing to create. Pay a guy $10 in 2005 in India, he writes a program that finds forums and makes spam profiles. Turn it on. Never turn it off. Voila. I am sure there is or was some model for moneymaking associated with these accounts. Who knows what it is, and if it is not bothering our community, what does it matter?

Which leads us to the issue, at least as I see it.... Is this a hunting website or a spam spot to generate revenue for somebody? And it's further complicated by the fact that many of these names have sexual content attached to it. Including links to probable por**ographic material as well as esKorrt services etc.

This is a hunting site. If you don't specifically go looking for those spammer profiles, you will not see them. Nobody is looking for them except a handful of people in this thread. I have no idea why. I get that you'd prefer they were not there. So would I. But if you think the technology exists to locate them en masse and prevent them from registering or to automatically delete them en masse, I assure you it does not. Again, it's a fact of life. Joel and I have manually deleted hundreds, if not thousands of them. Do you think I would be doing that if I could click a button and do it? We bulk-deleted over 40,000 profile we identified as probable spam. I didn't really want to do that, because there were undoubtedly real users caught in that web. But we did it for you guys, because of threads like this. Not because those profiles were doing any harm. Just because you asked. And we did it. We can't keep doing that, because the more we take guesses at who is a spammer, and the more accounts we bulk delete, the more real people get their accounts deleted.

The claim that these profiles are getting hundreds of views is incorrect, as I have pointed out many times. The VB software does not track such things accurately. NOBODY is coming to Huntingnet to look at people's profiles! Spammers or anyone else's! Why the heck would they? What possible point could there be in doing so? Google is certainly not sending people to profiles with adult content. No way. It's a simple counting glitch by the software. You can believe that or not.

CI and myself, as well as other mods, have previously discussed the moral aspect of continuing to serve and support a site that is hosting or allowing these types of profiles. Because to be honest, it bothers me. Especially when we searched for and deleted hundreds of profiles, spent hours of time, only to be told that it's "not a problem as long as they don't post on the actual forum" even though some of these profiles had hundreds of page visits.

We do not allow them. Again, find a site that has no spam? There are none. Certainly not community sites that are literally designed so that people will sign up, create a profile, and share information. We do not allow spam. We do everything we can to stop it. And yet, it happens anyway. If you're looking for a morally-motivated action, remember that there are thousands of hunters here, looking for real information and hobby friends. You can choose to help them, or you can choose to balk at some spam profiles that nobody sees unless they deliberately come looking for them. Which is the moral choice? I leave that to you. But I know that I'm going to keep deleting profiles that are brought to my attention. And deleting the rare spam posts that are actually made in the forums.

Now, to admins credit.... They've deleted accounts that we have brought to their attention . I have a thread on the mod forum with over 200 posts full of spammer accounts that we had admin permanently delete . Ibobi has deleted hundreds of accounts for us through this thread .

Thank you!

I guess I don't understand why a site with such low traffic, shows a membership of over 230,000 members. And why some of these spam members, who never post, still have many views on their profile . Who is viewing their profile and how are they getting to it? And what is HNI getting out of #1 all these members #2 all these profile views etc.

HN didn't always have the relatively moderate traffic it has today (and lest you think nobody comes here -- "moderate" means many hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, especially during peak fall season). The vast majority of those profiles are people who signed up years ago. And we get more signups every day (real ones, and some spambots). HN gets absolutely nothing from the spambot profiles or their posts. If we did, why would we delete them like cockroaches every time we see them? I think there is a very odd conspiracy theory operating here on some level, and I assure you, as with nearly all things in this universe, the simplest explanation is the truth: spam happens, we hate it, and it's hard to 100% eradicate. That's it.

-Jake