Spammers And Hackers

[Meathead]

Once in a while we see spammers in The Pit. Here are signs of spam:

1. It just sounds funny.
2. It comes from someone on a trial membership. Spammers don’t pay to join.
3. They have a low posts count.
4. There is usually a link to a site, often to a food or grill-themed site. Please, do not EVER click on any of questionable links!

We ban spammers as soon as we spot them. Trouble is we can't always be logged in 24/7, so if you spot spam, just click the "Flag" button on any post. The moderators or I will see that.

The good news is that your confidential info has never been hacked. Hackers have attacked, but your user names, email, addresses, phone numbers are all encrypted. As for credit cards, we never see or store them. When you enter that info into the pop-up window, it is actually a window from the card processor, Stripe, and they have never been hacked.

[Huskee]

Update: With the advancement of bots/AI, it can get trickier to identify spammers or fake Trial Members. They don't always show up and out themselves immediately by posting a link somewhere. If they do we delete it and ban them in fairly quick order. Instead, some may join up and appear to be a very friendly, chatty new member. AI can do convincing things. "Easing in" lowers our guard, so they think.

Things to help spot the likely fakes:

• Resurrecting old topics with no activity in a long time, and posting in them as if it's a current hot topic they just stumbled upon.
• Warmly welcoming others, when they themselves just joined. Not wrong or bad, just a touch strange, right?
• Posts with oddly inclusive language of the Original Poster's words, that may not make much sense.
  • Example, an original poster says something like: "Hello from sunny Florida, just joined and I'm glad to be here. I'm new to BBQ and I love to make my own wine."...
  • ...and the suspected fraud/bot "Trial Member" creates a reply saying something like "Welcome, we're glad you're here! Florida is a great place to learn BBQ, and your love of making wine will surely help you learn BBQ quickly!" <--- the oddities with such a post are likely obvious, but in such a case we see the inclusion of nearly every point made by the OP, and tying it together in a way that seems correct upon first read but really doesn't make much sense upon giving it a second whirl.
• Ask them a question. Bots might be able to assess a forum question and forge a reply, but often they ignore questions directed at them, because they can't detect and answer. But tech is improving weekly. If they post, but ignore direct questions, what might that tell you? Likely it's a bytemaster and not a pitmaster.

Anyway, the mods & I are well aware of when this sorta thing happens here. Friendly bots who post slightly odd things but do not violate our Rules & Guidelines by posting spam links, well, they're relatively harmless. IN NO WAY can someone with Trial Member status (or any member status, but least of all Trial) get sensitive info from any of our members. Please do not feel like this is a sneaky backdoor way for ne'er-do-wellers to "get inside" so to speak. NO payment info from anyone is kept in our system or servers. All payment info is either in Stripe or PayPal. I'm not going to say they're unhackable, but close. And they have nothing to do with us, except their system telling our system "Yep, let 'em in", that's it.

And if you have not shared your physical address or email addresses or phone numbers in your signatures, or "Location" details, (those two sections are visible to anyone), or in any posts, then you do not have to worry about anything of the sort. Your mailing address/email/phone details are not visible to anyone except administrators which requires another login screen separate from logging in to The Pit here. And staff have crazy wild passwords to avoid brute force hijacking to the extent possible. And as Meathead mentions above, that info is encrypted so w/o a password it's a no-go.

Now, there's of course always the chance that what seems like an 'overly-friendly bot disguised as a new Trial Member' actually is a legitimate human who's just super duper friendly. So let's give the benefit of the doubt and not be mean to a potentially real new Trial Member. If any prove themselves to not be real, they'll be eliminated, we're a watchful bunch here. And especially so if they violate our Rules and post spam links. Oh, and this may be obvious, but NEVER EVER click a link posted by a brand new unknown Trial Member, even if they seem legit. Not worth it.

Party on, Wayne! Party on, Garth!

[glitchy]

A five year old topic was just resurrected, can I get a non-bot mod to take a closer look into this fellas history?

[Huskee]

glitchy If am happy to cook for happiness and most joy, then I too am a real Huskee.

[FireMan]

Hey Huskee, are you Huskee and do you like a lot of wine with yer wine? Oh, I used to be from Florida even though I’ve never been there. Wanna see my grill?

[Huskee]

Oh Florida is good for planting sunshine and make happy cooking for those we must love. You must love your grill and make happy, as we all love joy, it the utmost of happiness to be filled with sunshine and grill.

[Carolyn]

So, I should be nice and not post my Monty Python comment like I usually do when I detect a spammer?
"Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam. Lovely Spam, wonderful Spam." 😁