Weird poster in my forum

Forum Moderators: rogerd

Message Too Old, No Replies

Weird poster in my forum

long time participant, but not on topic

wheel

4:33 pm on Dec 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

I've got a participant on a very niche forum, they've been coming to the site for 2 years anyway. And they post relatively regularly - a few hundred posts over that span.

But they only ever post jokes in the 'foo' section. That's it. No participation in any of the industry conversations, nothing. Just cut and paste jokes. And it is a person not a bot because someone called them out at one point and they did respond (but very vaguely).

I'm not even sure the poster is even in my industry.

Any thoughts on what's going on with this poster? I feel like there's a small possibility I'm being played, but I don't see how.

caribguy

4:55 pm on Dec 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

You can grep your logs for that user's ip address and see if they also browse other topics on your forum.

The ip address and timestamps could give you an indication of where that user is visiting from (geo region, home/work).

It all depends on how much time you want to spend on it :) If the posts are just "borderline" I'd probably ignore the issue.

Brett_Tabke

3:03 am on Dec 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

Have you put the jokes into google or copy left and looked for other forums they may be duplicating posts in.

At one point, I tried running every new post here by a new user through copyleft. We wanted to find people that were posting the same q's in a whole bunch of forums.

thecoalman

4:27 pm on Dec 28, 2009 (gmt 0)

I've seen that behavior on at least one forum, actually had a few people like that. I think what happens is they might have a problem they needed solved, found the foo section and settled in. They might have an interest in the topic but don't have the qualifications for answering questions.

Other possibilities include setting you up for edits to signatures or posts if you allow them and the foo section is indexed by bots. The poster disappears for a while letting his posts get buried and comes back to edit them or the signature.

gpilling

4:17 pm on Dec 29, 2009 (gmt 0)

Do you allow links in signatures? Perhaps they are just spamming for backlinks.

rogerd

3:16 am on Dec 31, 2009 (gmt 0)

Could be that, or for profile links that will benefit from continued posting activity.

Overall, it sounds quite harmless, however odd it might be.