How many monkeys does it take to spam a forum?
You can have the best anti-spam protection on the planet and still find yourself getting spammed by actual human beings who aren’t using any robots. Fortunately, with the number of forums and blogs on the ‘net, the chances of yours getting targeted by the lone typing monkey is slim. Even so, it does happen.
Sadly, there are people in under-developed nations who are willing to sell their morals (and their typing abilities) for a few pennies. Here’s an example from one of the popular freelance project marketplaces:
“I need someone who will work 5 or 7 days a week. So when you place your bid please let me know if the bid is for working 5 or 7 days a week. The job requires you to only do the following. Log onto a dedicated server I have using remote desktop. Once you login to the dedicated server you will open a program and hit the start button. After about 30 seconds a box will appear with a CAPTCHA image. All you have to do is type what the image says and hit enter. I myself can enter about 10 images per minute. I would be looking for about 3000 successful image type ins a day. If you are interested please post a bid and like I said let me know if the bid is for working 5 or 7 days a week. Also please inform me on when you will be able to work and what time zone you are in so I know what hours that is for me. Thanks.”
Believe it or not, 42 people responded to that bid and the wanna-be spammer ended up hiring a typing money to work a FULL 7 DAYS for just $75. That’s $1.33 per hour based upon an 8-hour work day.
Now he doesn’t come out and say it, but you can bet that the buyer is building a spam robot and his third-world partner was all too happy to help him.
Spam is big business, but it takes millions of posts to make the cash register ring. That’s why you don’t have to worry about the occasional typing money who targets a couple of forums for some good old-fashioned manual spam.
What you do have to worry about are these clowns who know how to hire cheap labor to help them build armies of spam robots that will keep you up day and night defending your perimeters unless you’re armed with the latest anti-spam tools like ATC.