Forum spamming

Spam in online forums is nothing new - in fact, long before it became pretty much exclusively associated with e-mail, the term used to mean inappropriate messages blasted to dozens of unrelated Usenet newsgroups.

But the forum spammers, as you might expect, are getting smarter.

Take, for example, New Media Strategies, a Washington company, which, among other things, "harnesses the power of the online communities and opinion leaders to raise awareness of your brands and, ultimately, produce sales that bolster your bottom line."

I know about New Media Strategies because of a forum I run in my off hours that focuses on life in Boston. Over the past couple of months, the forum has gotten several postings about "All My Children," specifically, about some contest ABC is running related to the show. After the latest posting, I got curious, there just seemed something a bit "off" about the messages (the posting started "whoops, sorry to leave so many questions unanswered guys" when, in fact, the few people who'd answered an earlier post expressed serious ennui on the topic of "All My Children") So using some super-secret methods that you guys could figure out in about five seconds, but which have apparently eluded certain people, I quickly figured out that the postings were in fact all coming from New Media Strategies.

In other words, it seems as if somebody in the employ of New Media Strategies (or somebody cunningly hijacking its IP address range) was hiding behind fake names to promote some dumb contest.

Harmless enough as it goes (it's not as if New Media Strategies were asking for donations to save orphan puppies or something), but it got me thinking about the role of online forums and Weblogs as we enter the next presidential election cycle. Given the growing popularity of Weblogs and forums, given the existence of companies such as New Media Strategies, and given the fine work done by online pornographers in harnessing the power of Weblogs (by spamming their comment systems and referrer logs), who knows what sort of mischief somebody could try to pull off next year?

John Robb, until recently president of UserLand Software, which makes Weblogging software, has started thinking about this as well. He says he wouldn't be surprised if somebody like Bush advisor Karl Rove tries this:

"Imagine a huge network of 'dittoheads' and 'moral majority' readers/publishers connected by e-mail and weblogs/RSS. It would be easy to 'leak' a false rumor and have it go national in a matter of days. There is no easy mechanism or requirement for fact checking in this medium. There is also a huge thirst for new 'dirt.' By the time opposition forms to 'out' the rumor, the damage would have been done."