The sworn enemy of my forums have always been Spammers.  But gone are the golden days of the easily machine detectable plea to buy male enhancement products in broken English – today we have something much more diabolical.

The Art Of Text Recycling

Take a look at this post to our forums:

Now, before you pour your heart into helping “Stella” achieve her dream, look at this:

Yup, it’s relevant text that was stolen from a Yahoo! Answers post.

It looks like a totally legitimate question.  It’s the correct topic, posted into the correct area.  Our spam detection system (Akismet) failed to flag it.

What if Automated Next-Gen spammers start doing things like:

• Text recycle a post
• Wait a week or so, giving time for innocent dupes to make replies to your original post
• Come back and add your spam URL to your forum signature, or possibly the post itself

Actually I think I have seen the above happen a few times recently.  Meh, annoying.