When the Bots Get Real (Part One)

What happens when your site is being spammed not by automated bots but by real humans who are obviously being paid some nominal amount to pretend they are legit?  They can read the captcha, take the math tests, and can register and fill out the required bio.   It means that real humans have to wade through all of these registrations, one by one, to figure out who is legit and who is dying to become a member of HASTAC in order that they can plant their url's throughout the site, hawking replica purses, six pack abs, great sex, or hydroxycut.   These are the equivalent of the "Gold Farmers" but, instead of being hired at sweatshop wages to play your MMOPG for you while you hold down your day job, these false registerers are obviously being paid to go to well-traveled sites to lure others.  I don't think they have a name yet so we can call them "Gold Harvesters."

Next week, Mandy and Nancy, two of the real HASTAC humans who go through each registration to weed out these tricky human spammers, are planning to blog about some of the more hilarious applications we have received.   The Gold Harvesters (how quickly a coinage becomes a proper noun!) obviously use a combination of automated tools and their own abilities, sometimes with highly limited English skills.  They are so adept at picking up a blog post, for example, and reappropriating the language as part of their pleading to be admitted to the club, that you have to read every word . . . and the name sending it.  Once I read a response to one of my blogs too quickly and actually struck up an intellectual conversation with someone on some heady technology subject or other---only to have Nancy point out that, uh, they were pitching "How To Please Your Woman" or something that doesn't quite fit within the HASTAC mission statement. 

Searching out the Gold Harversters is extremely time consuming, but necessary since we are an open community and you do not all want to be getting this spam.   That's part of our pledge as a networked community, to try to be as open as possible while yet addressing the realities of digital marketing, sweatshop exploitation of workers worldwide for digital industries, and our own integrity. It's a line, but it's not really a fine one.   In one case, we are creating communities for those of us who often feel that "being ahead of the curve" can be a lonely place.   Within HASTAC, there is so much energy, so many good ideas, and we grow bigger and more influential every year.  That is incredibly gratifying.   On the other hand, because of this success, because we now have about 5000 unique visitors to the HASTAC site each week, because of our commitment to openness, we are ripe for Gold Harvesting.   It's painful to think people are being paid some terribly exploitive wage to create false registrations to our HASTAC site. 

It's also painful for HASTAC central members to spend a good portion of every week reading each registration carefully to try to sort out those who very much want to be part of our community from those who want to exploit our community for potential profit for the dubious and sometimes downright sinister companies who hire them for a pittance to perform their task.    Some days, we are getting as many as ten to thirty of these per hour.  Yes, we're going through the entire Drupal repertoire of tools to prevent this.  Yes, we have an SOS to the Drupal community looking for other ways of preventing this.  To our chagrin, the most common solution people are offering us to control this problem is requiring a minimal registration fee, even one that can be remitted.   A penny, a quarter.  Apparently that stops the spammers.   It's also a pain for all of us to do this, you as community members and we as HASTAC Central administrators of the network.  Duke University, where the website is located, is not entirely crazy about this idea either.

Ideas welcome!

And, in the meantime, it's great to have a sense of humor about it.  So, next week, Mandy and Nancy might share some of the best registrations . . .    It was a good source of fun at the end of a busy week.

Have a great weekend, everybody--bots, Gold Harvesters, and all!