... like grassroots campaigning, only fake. A new member registered today on my forum for children's entertainers, and made two posts with the exact same message about the next season of Big Brother. And a couple of weeks ago a lady registered under the name of Carolyn and promoted some stupid dancing gummy bear video, saying it was the new Crazy Frog. Anyone else getting Astroturf on their carefully cultivated forums?

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disabledNYC | The Chic Petite | Ice Cream Forum

No, but I get the stupid WoW spammers from time to time.

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Virtual Pet Sites - Myspace Editors-web games

I still don't get it...What's astroturfing?

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Astroturfing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Basically, it's a marketing technique that pretends to be a 'grassroots' movement

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Gotcha, in that case, I can't say that I've ever had that happen to a forum of mine...I've never even seen it happen at other forums or heard of it happening either

Interesting stuff...

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I often get the type of spam where one member would register with a problem. Usually you tend to notice that there's something not right about the post. So I copy and paste it into Google and it turns out it looks like this user posted their problem on a lot of forums. A few days later, another person will register and post the "answer" which includes a link to some product page.

Now if I spot one of these I Google the post. If it's this "question answer spam" I ban the person who started the thread.

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