Los Angeles

[Andiamo53]

For whatever reason, there have been a slew of word-for-word repeat postings by "newbies" lately. In the last 36 hours there have been four of them:  "andrea15", "tinmoral", "Sandraro" and "joel12d". Don't know why this is happening and why Redfin isn't on top of this. But I feel like an idiot when I take time to answer a question, only to find out it is a spam posting in the first place. From now on, I am going to suspect any thread started by a newbie until Redfin notifies us that the problem has been taken care of.

Does anyone have a theory why spammers are doing this. What's the benefit to them?

[Ed_in_SoCal]

In this world with billions of people, every abhorrant behavior along the spectrum has multiples of people dong that behavior.  We've seen a levels of it in this forum.  Sometimes I wonder if they even have a reason, or they are just so cross-wired they just do it without thinking.  And of course, they feel they are justified in their rage.

But if I were to guess a "logical" reason, I'd say they have a grudge against one or more posters in this forum and just want to jerk them around.  Or against the whole forum in general.

[BillR]

If Redfin has automated spam detection (which, I imagine, they must) they likely have a bayesian classifier or similar somewhere in the mix. Re-posting what appears to be legit content would one way to attempt to "trick" the classifier, by improving the signal in their signal-to-noise ratio.

In other words, the automated system may act differently if it see a suspect post, but 3 other valid posts are from the same author, compared to 1 suspect post with no other activity or only similarly suspicious posts.

[wotevah]

Maybe they plan to change them into link spam later on, by editing the posts or changing the sigs after the threads drop off the radar.

[Goran_K]

To be honest, the forum has been running pretty smoothly recently. I didn't realize we were even under "newbie" attack.

[dreamama]

you have to admit that it's a pretty funny way to irritate people. Like many have said, you take the time to really try to help someone only to find that you're advice is worthless and the joke is on you.  Super annoying....

[dansup]

anything's possible I suppose

[Pasta]

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Andiamo53 wrote:

For whatever reason, there have been a slew of word-for-word repeat postings by "newbies" lately. In the last 36 hours there have been four of them:  "andrea15", "tinmoral", "Sandraro" and "joel12d". Don't know why this is happening and why Redfin isn't on top of this. But I feel like an idiot when I take time to answer a question, only to find out it is a spam posting in the first place. From now on, I am going to suspect any thread started by a newbie until Redfin notifies us that the problem has been taken care of.

Does anyone have a theory why spammers are doing this. What's the benefit to them?

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Andiamo,

I've noticed the last couple weeks that there have been a lot of newbie posts, most seemingly knowledgeable, not seeming like "newbies."

[SheilaM]

Hi guys,

I wanted to let you know that we are looking into the issue.  In the meantime, if you are concerned about a topic from a new user not being legit, you can do a search on the first line of any post to see if it is a copied post/topic.  We also want to thank those of you who have reported this issue to us, so that we can look into a solution.  Thanks everyone!

[Andiamo53]

^^^

Thanks Sheila.