Stay out mah forum youse gold spammers

by Garwulf on June 15, 2010 · 10 comments

Just before hitting the rack the other night, I checked my e-mail one last time before I turned in. What did I see..? About 50 e-mails indicating fresh forum posts.

The first thing that went through my head, was oh no… more g-damn gold spammers! Was I right… of course.

I typically delete about 6-12 per week, but they’re usually from different sites. These aren’t bots either. They’re actual human beings, taking the time to register and jump through the Captcha hoop in order to post their BS on my forums.

My first step is always to remove them as a user, then delete their entries. It’s not a huge pain, as there are usually only a couple, but at times such as the other night, I want to strangle these f**ks.

Fortunately, I was able to catch this guy early on during his assault and delete his account. He was basically adding a new post to every single topic in the forum.

Unfortunately for me, I wished I’d have paused a second longer and thought to bulk delete his posts, rather than go straight for the account. I ended up having to manually dispose of about 50 gold spam posts.

Anyway, enough of that… The reason I mention this is, I’m completely fed up with these jokers. Regardless of whether or not they’re “legitimately” farming the gold, it’s still a shady business no matter how you slice it. I’m sick of seeing the gold spam in-game and I’m sick of hearing about all of the account hacks going on.

These guys are getting so desperate now for some reason, that they’ve resorted to re-activating dormant accounts just to hijack them. Grrr… I’ve seen this happen at least 4 times in the past two weeks to members of my own guild. I’m guessing that gold sales are down due to the upswing in the WoW economy, leading the gold sellers to become more competitive and aggressive.

Lastly, if you have a WoW blog and you’re using AdSense to help offset some of the operating costs (as I do), I urge you to block these f**kers in your competitive ad filter.

In fact, I’ll even help you with this… Here’s my list which has been compiled over the past 18 months or so. There may be a few Ive missed, but most of the key players are in here. Copy and paste this list into your Competitive Ad Filter, and help rid the WoW blogosphere of these wretched swine.

brogame.com
epictoon.com
forsaken-farmers.com
game4power.com
games.com
gdpchina.com
goldrocku.com
guild4power.com
guy4game.com
ibay24.net
igs.com
ingamefair.com
mmoepics.com
mmosale.com
mmosavor.com
moogold.com
myeasygold.com
mywowgoldsale.com
oforu.com
pkpve.com
pkpvp.com
power-level.net
powerlevelings.com
pvp-depot.com
shinygame.com
shinywowgold.com
speebie.us
team4power.com
thsale.com
u4game.com
vcsale.com
warcraft-advantage.com
wowgold-usa.com
wowgoldgroup.com
wowgoldsavor.com

If you’re not blocking these ads, then you’re supporting this unscrupulous business.

That is all.

Now to talk about something fun… hmmm… bbl.

Tagged as: ads, gold spammers

{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }

1 lawman30 June 15, 2010 at 5:43 pm

Yet another reason Gar RULZ!!!! DEATH 2 DA GOLD SELLERZ!!!!!! I hate seeing that crap in game too and I ALWAYS report spam and ignore those bastages!!! I get pestered with enough mundane crap at work all day that I DO NOT need it in mah game!

2 hakuro June 16, 2010 at 6:34 am

These sites are both disgusting and way too abundant, I found the bodies on the floor of SW humorous… I don’t mind farmers quietly farming gold. I hate the advertising, It’s increased so much in the last few months, I can’t walk through any city without seeing “WELLCOME, BY NOW AT 0% LESS!”. The lack of grammatically correct sentences they use also annoys me. I’m no scholar, but I can write fairly correct sentences. Simply, they are scum.

3 PingHansen June 17, 2010 at 1:41 pm: There was actually a new version of the body add (at least one I haven’t seen before) being built in SW today. Quite fascinating to watch, actually. But it didn’t take lone before just about everybody in the vicinity started summoning their largest mount and moved to stand on the body-add. The little Chinamen de-spawned shortly after ;o)

Reply

4 Uchikoma June 16, 2010 at 12:42 pm

While annoying, I find it interesting when I see someone controlling 37 lvl1 characters to line them up to spell out a gold selling website address… in the air… seriously I was in Org the other day and there were dozens of characters floating in the air spelling out a website URL. I was under the impression the old “fly” hacks were long gone, but it seems not.

5 Garwulf June 17, 2010 at 1:40 pm: I haven’t seen those for some time, but yea… that is some crazy s**t. I’ve yet to see any airborne carcasses though.

Reply

6 Kyofu from Dragonmaw June 16, 2010 at 6:43 pm

i have a website i maintain for card game i play so i know your pain about gold spammers, what i ended up doing because i got nothing but porn posts (they would register through all the crap that i put on to make sure people were human) is i copied over every name on the list in “Registered Users” and made a new user group called “general forums” i then removed all permissions on every forum to prevent registered users from making posts or even seeing the forums and instead put the general forums in (after copying registered users permissions), i then had a special forum made (cant post in it but everyone can see it) that detailed how one went about joining user groups as well as asking people to join the “General Forums” user group to see the forums.

after the initial two weeks of several people logging in and going “whoa! i cant see anything” and continually bumping the thread till everyone was good to go. i haven’t gotten a single post of spam since. maybe you should try it out? i just got to the point where i was tired of continually deleting/banning all these posts and users, it was about 30 mins worth of work that eliminated all spam from my forums. food for thought!

7 Garwulf June 17, 2010 at 1:38 pm: Provided that was a one-off attack, I’ll likely just leave things as they are. I don’t want to have to make things more difficult for users if at all possible.

What I need to do though, is to stop deleting these users and just ban them from all forums. I’m sure they’ll still re-register with another name at some point, but at least it will make things a little more difficult.

What I’d like to do is put a perma-ban on the various IPs. After researching though, it doesn’t appear that WP or my forum software has any inherent ability to do so. It requires an additional plugin (which, based on reviews, may be a bit dodgy), or the hacking of the .htaccess file. Given those two choices, I usually just go with the quick-fix of deleting their account and posts.

I’m just going to maintain a watchful eye on things and see how it goes. Thank you for the suggestions and advice though. I’ll definitely keep that in mind.

Reply

8 zt June 26, 2010 at 8:17 pm

ingamefair.com just scammed my nine year old son. scum bags

9 Garwulf June 27, 2010 at 12:51 am: Fargin iceholes! These guys are the carnies of the internet.

Reply

10 Hottage @ Executus EU November 24, 2010 at 3:15 am

Liking this initiative, been looking for a list of gold sellers, botters, power-levellers, hackers and other such scum of the MMO internet community to ban-hammer en-masse, and this is the first proper list I’ve seen so far. The one “grey area” item I’m not blocking are pay-to-use guides, as they don’t breach the Terms of Service.

I’ve added them to my AdSense blocks, and compiled a list of them all here:

http://www.retlol-the-guide.com/banned-sites.txt

Currently this contains 55 top level domains (including the ones listed here).
If anyone has more to offer, you can submit them here:

http://www.retlol-the-guide.com/report_ad.php