49

There are many inactive user profiles on SO that were clearly registered by spammers. The spam posts (if there were any) are already removed but the profiles remain. Some of them put their spam text into the "about me" field, see for example deleted and deleted. If you google this text, it has been spammed all over the web. I guess that the purpose is manipulating search engines - when searching for particular keywords a website with a link to the spammer's site will likely come up as a result.

Is that something that we need to worry about? I can see why the answer would be "no": unlike spam in questions, this isn't a problem for SO - nobody sees these profiles. So this isn't really worth investing effort into. Then again, I hate spam and don't like making spammer's life easy.

If the answer to the previous question is "yes", what can be done about it? Obviously, anything requiring much effort from the community or the devs isn't going to work. One solution I can think of: stop displaying "about me" text for profiles that have neither answers nor questions and that have been inactive for at least a month. Maybe stop displaying the webpage link as well.

Edit: I found many dozens of user profiles (now all deleted) when searching the user database by the keywords "sms", "market", "website", "free", "cheap", "gift", "flower" and "florist". If you then sort by all time reputation score and concentrate on accounts with reputation 1 to 11 it isn't hard to find lots of spammer accounts. (Some of them have the necessary keywords in their user name, they don't use the "about me" text then.) Still, combing through the user database like this requires far too much effort and I definitely don't think that it is a viable solution.

As staticbeast notes in the comments, the Data Explorer is great for finding these profiles.

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  • 12
    This for me, whilst not being a major concern, is another reason why we should have the ability to flag user profiles as well as content.
    – razlebe
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 11:14
  • 1
    They look burninated now...
    – Marc Gravell
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 11:29
  • 3
    interesting, how did you find these profiles? That's the tricky part..
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 11:29
  • 6
    @Jeff: I've noticed spam from the account "mobile marketing sms" so tried searching for the keywords "market" and "sms" in the user database. I then noticed that "website" and "free" are also good keywords to search for spam accounts.
    – Wladimir Palant
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 11:31
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    Ohy BABY that felt good. I burninated all edit2's that smelled funny (left a couple that had personal info in their profiles). The SMS users I burninated gave me a funny tickly feeling in my pants when I did it.
    – user1228
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 15:33
  • @Won't: Feel free to have fun with "edit3" as well.
    – Wladimir Palant
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 18:44
  • @WladimirPalant: Silence of the Flowers, angry birds and soft peckers.
    – user1228
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 19:27
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    Coupon makes for good hits: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/111799
    – staticbeast
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 19:44
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    SEO is another good one: google.com/search?&q=site%3Astackoverflow.com%2Fusers+seo
    – bkaid
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 19:47
  • @OffBySome: After that round of deletions, I bet there are a lot of SEOre asses out there...
    – user1228
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 20:25
  • 1
    @Won't: And since I care about your fun - there you have some more great user profiles. Maybe StackExchange should simply build a competing service to Yellow Pages. There is already enough content, it only needs to be categorized.
    – Wladimir Palant
    Commented Sep 7, 2011 at 6:31
  • 3
    I sure wish we could flag these accounts for moderation attention. With no posts/questions, we can't flag the posts.
    – Engineer2021
    Commented Sep 7, 2011 at 12:43

2 Answers 2

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30

The trick is finding these spam profile user accounts, really.

For reference here are the two accounts, now burninated, in picture form:

enter image description here enter image description here

If anyone has protips on what to search for to find accounts like these, I'm all ears.

Note that

  1. Links in your "about me" field don't work for low-rep users; we don't allow more than 2 links by new users in this field, and they aren't actually hyperlinked until you have 15 rep.

  2. The "website" field is not hyperlinked until you generate 15 rep.

... so the damage potential here is small.

That said of course we hate spammers and I love killing their user accounts, but there is a weird little edge condition of users who set up accounts with spam profile info but never ask or answer questions.

It's much harder for us to detect, so.. any tips, techniques, or ideas are welcome.

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15
  • I edited my question to include the approach I used. But I think that the effort required isn't justified for a minor issue like this.
    – Wladimir Palant
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 12:01
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    I think that profile that was created but has no activity whatsoever for X days (one week?) should raise a flag, if it contains "website" link and About Me information. Let members review such profiles with the ability to send moderator flag same way we can already review bad posts for example.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 12:09
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    Get an Akismet key, shoot them a little money and start running profiles through it in the background. After that, let "Community ♦ " raise a flag if a user's profile scores a hit in the future. Our SPAM could help Akismet get better, and I know of no better way to find these than to run the whole lot through an algorithm.
    – user50049
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 13:26
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    @Jeff - this is the exact reason I suggested adding the ability to flag user profiles: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/101538/…
    – JNK
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 14:16
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    Maybe a new mod tools tab for new, suspect accounts? Could be unregistered users with a website, registered users with low activity, but an "about me" field or a website, and anyone who has a spam flag on their content deemed valid.
    – a cat
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 14:24
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    Also don't forget that there's a minimum of 2000 rep. before nofollow is removed from even the Website field, let alone the About Me field.
    – uɐɯsO uɐɥʇɐN
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 16:09
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    What about feeding the current found spam user details and normal user details into a Bayesian filtering, I think Joel was written software that uses them in the past.
    – Ian Ringrose
    Commented Sep 7, 2011 at 11:58
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    I just noticed this user with 59 stack exchange accounts but not one post as yet
    – Martin Smith
    Commented Feb 4, 2012 at 15:38
  • @martin we'll deal with that, sorry -- don't hesitate to email us if you find these, and we'll fix ASAP
    – Jeff Atwood
    Commented Feb 4, 2012 at 17:53
  • @JeffAtwood: I've proposed a solution here.
    – bwDraco
    Commented Aug 25, 2012 at 5:33
  • but Sir Jeff, my little concern here is - don't you think you might be helping these two spammers? by using their pic profile - because there are 636 views-(at time of me posting this)- which automatically qualifies to 636 hits.. that's more of a good job done thou..lol.. that's just my lil tots or concern
    – Elltz
    Commented Nov 26, 2014 at 19:35
  • A Spam filter can be trained with supervised methods (given all the data SE must have), for example the Naive Bayes algorithm has been successfully implemented in the past as Spam filters. It should apply here, as non-spam users have certain words and things on their profiles spam users don't and the algorithm learns about that. There are other more complex algorithms of course, but this one is easy to implement and straightforward if you are looking for a "quick" test to see if it is worth putting more time to it.
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Oct 24, 2017 at 19:06
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    If any moderator stumbles upon this post, there's now a way to detect users with spam in their profile on creation. You can jump into Mobotics and add your site to the list.
    – Bhargav Rao
    Commented Apr 17, 2018 at 0:23
  • @BhargavRao is that bot still maintained, I think there are some other things you could add to the detection list.
    – Luuklag
    Commented Oct 18, 2019 at 11:01
  • concerning detecting accounts that don't post, see my post meta.stackoverflow.com/q/421453/11107541. TL;DR these accounts are often huge pools that do things like put the same value in their website URL field.
    – starball
    Commented Jun 27, 2023 at 23:19
19

It still appears in Google results so in my opinion it's not good situation: Stack Overflow is indirectly linked with Spam.

Inactive accounts should be deleted after six months of inactivity, but it's too long for spam accounts.. IMO such accounts need to be zapped by moderator on spot.

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7
  • They normally are. The problem is if users decide to put flag-weight over good use of the flagging system. If a user is Moderator Attention flagged for spam, his account will be squeezed into a tiny box (which itself will be thrown into the sea, where it will be eaten by a bigger fish), but if that does not happen, the account can live on by chance.
    – Time Traveling Bobby
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 11:30
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    Thanks, guess we'll just have to report such spammers who live by chance in here and moderators will come over and eat their account. :)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 11:40
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    I don't think that inactive accounts are deleted - see stackoverflow.com/users/356122/website-development-new-delhi for example.
    – Wladimir Palant
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 11:57
  • @Wladimir thanks, looks like it's a bug then, according to this and this - probably the deleted posts are taken into account as activity.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Sep 6, 2011 at 12:03
  • Yes, Google search results are still ugly. And some of these are very old so the automatic deletion definitely doesn't work.
    – Wladimir Palant
    Commented Aug 28, 2012 at 16:18
  • A decade later, inactive accounts still aren't deleted. This one has a hundred accounts with zero activity, some 11 months old. stackexchange.com/users/27319689/… @jeffatwood
    – Camille Goudeseune
    Commented Dec 21, 2023 at 22:19
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    @CamilleGoudeseune yeah this is one thing Stack Exchange does not want to address, for reasons I can't know. Anyway Jeff did not get your ping, and even if he did, nothing he can do, he isn't working at SE for long years and has no effect on it.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Dec 22, 2023 at 13:01

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