Any Spam experts around?

[screengold]

A banner ad on my forum sends people to a landing page on an affiliate site that requests the user to complete name, email, phone number, etc.

Ever since I set it up on the 28th Sept, the landing page has been plagued with fake sign ups. The patterns of names, emails etc makes it look like an automated spammer.

I suspect some spambot is somehow following the link from the forum to the affiliate site and completing the form there. Why, I have no idea.

I have actually had my account suspended with the trading company due to this spam, so I would love to sort this out.

But my hosting company say it's down to me - I'm afraid I don't know how to even start on this one.

Has anyone got any thoughts?

Thanks!

[kh99]

I'm not a spam expert, but if it's just a link on your site then I don't know what you can do about it. I suppose if it really is bots following the link you could try using a javascript "onclick=" instead of putting the url in the href, but I'm not sure how sophisticated bots are.

Maybe you could make it visible to members only? Have you looked at the ip addresses the forms were submitted from (assuming those are available from the affiliate) to see if it's one location or many, and maybe if they match any of your members?

[screengold]

Oh, that's interesting - members only cuts down potential sales massively - but I will look at that javascript, thanks.

The Affiliate doesn't have track the IP addresses, which is frustrating.

[Simon Lloyd]

It should be down to the affiliate to have a captcha or such like for their forms, anyway you can try this, wrap your links in this <if condition="$show['search_engine']">
<!-- SHow what you want to the search engines -->
<else />
<!-- Show your links -->
</if>

[kpmedia]

There's realistically nothing that can be done here.

That the site was spammed around the same time you put up a banner is more likely coincidence than anything else. If that site doesn't want spam, then that site's landing page will have to add some anti-spam measures, including blocking IPs for countries that only generate noise.