I just closed the thread on exporting to Proteus<sp?>. A held new user post may have been from someone on the Proteus team sounding like a reference to some ticket that may be open on the subject on their end. Hard to say, it was just word salad to me. At first I thought it might be some weird CrapGTP answer but the IP address didn’t make it seem too likely.
I don’t know if Proteus has their own forum but the user can DM the OP of the thread and take it up in private if it is legit. Had the answer made more sense I might not have taken this action but geez.
I found out how to pull up a denied post in raw form:
created_at: 2023-12-27 00:26:06 UTC
rejected_at: 2023-12-27T00:58:40+00:00
user: markallen (mark allen)
topic: How to transfer my Kicad work to Proteus interface?
raw: Thanks for your report. We appreciate your feedback. This issue presents similarly to the problem that was fixed previously, but it appears to be a new issue in version 2.3.0. We have reported it to the developers and added your report to the bug report. We are actively working on resolving this issue to improve the user experience.
Additionally, regarding the “[9 class date sheet 2023](https ://ilmwap.com/)”, could you please clarify or provide more context about how it relates to the issue or any specific information you are looking for? Feel free to share more details or ask any questions you may have
Well the answer is there if they ever bother to return to read it.
With a single opening post and only two minutes activity, I doubt the OP has ever read the replies.
Doubt the spammer cares. The reason for this trick is likely to do with google page rank manipulation. The more references picked up referring to a particular site, contributes to the sites page rank, and likely to its place on google’s search results. You probably have a robots.txt file permitting google (and others) to scan your site. That probably does not trigger your activity counter, since otherwise your stats would be be distorted by any visiting scanner.
The spammer has no interest in the site, other than as an opportunity to get an external reference to the target site into googles scan. It is probably automated, simply replies to a legitimate post quoting some or all of the original text and inserting some text that contains the URL, with no care that the added text is absolute rubbish. For extra annoyance generate a new topic with the munged posting. Its worth looking if the rest of the thread makes sense, or if the munged posting is part of a stream of nonsense. Dumping the thread may be excessive if there is actually meaningful content in the thread, simply excise the munged posting. Not just hide it, as visiting robots may find it and reward the spammer. If you have the tools, its worth scanning all posts for that URL, and excising those as well, just to spoil the spammers efforts.
I didn’t dump the thread. I just closed it. There isn’t, and doubtfully ever will be, an exporter for another ECAD program. I just deleted the spam post. And once I actually followed the link, deleted the spammer. I should have done that first. I guess it was a time issue thing. So, now I’m spending more time than I would have initially.
We kinda default to trusting until proven otherwise I guess.
The actual target site in the posting may be relatively innocent, there are shady groups offering “page rank improvement services”, without the customers necessarily being aware that they are employing a spammer. If you are confident of that target sites complicity, you could suggest that site as a spam source to some of the block list groups, which will definately impact their scheme.