Spambots - How do you get rid of it

[danmayna]

Hi,

I am getting lots of entries but it is all Chinese at Twitter but can't find any of the promotional text. Does anybody no what is going on? Is it spam?

See the standings at http://www.piano-keyboard-reviews.com/standings.html

[jetaviator7]

Hi Dan:

I used the translator function on FireFox and most of them are Japanese.

My guess is that they have spread your contest viral throughout their friends in Japan!

John

[danmayna]

Hi John,

Thanks for the reply. However, I can't for the life of me find a link back to my site from the vast number of tweets in Japanese. Also my on site stats don't support the notion of real visitors. I also found a username that ended in "bot". So I suspect these are all spam bots. Anybody else experiencing this?

[jetaviator7]

Dan:

I looked at about a dozen of them and then translated them - the ones I looked at were having typical twitter conversations just like us here in America.

I haven't run a contest yet but I was thinking about putting a statement that the contest was only for North American and Western European countries. I don't know if that would help or not.

I don't know if the technology exists to eliminate anyone in the world from participating.

Interesting plug in, but perhaps not too useful if all you get is spam. I did see the one with the .bot extension, but didn't look at it.

John

[syoungb]

Is there a way to see where someone is getting points from? I have one contestant that is adding up points but I haven't seen any Tweets in the last 24 hours.

[greg]

Originally Posted by syoungb

Is there a way to see where someone is getting points from? I have one contestant that is adding up points but I haven't seen any Tweets in the last 24 hours.

You can view the source of the points by viewing the raw data in the mysql database tables but unless you are familiar with mysql I would not recommend this. As far as the points in your contest Bill and I looked at your stats page and it does not look like anything unusual is happening. Most of the points your contestants receive will be from people clicking on the links that they post, not from them Tweeting. They could Tweet once and if they have a lot of followers get hundreds of clicks from one tweet. This is really the idea, to drive traffic to your site.

I discussed with Bill the ability to see the source of the points in your contest and this is probably something we will add in the future.