Did you notice Github's Spamming?

github.com

9 points·jdcaballero··6 comments

I've seen emails like these before, but I don't understand them.

Take the linked github repo. What's the point? I realize I'm not the target audience, but usually spam has some link that I'm supposed to fall prey to, some Nigerian royalty who desperately desires to transfer money to my bank account.

This, however, contains no links. No visible way to be scammed, or even purchase anything. It isn't even well written, to the point of almost looking like a bad Markov chain. Is this just a spammer testing the waters?

I suppose maybe they're related to the first Google hit for "Forex"? Too much work. (Of course, I'm extremely not interested due to the spam/scan aspect.)

I think the spammers are trying to pollute the (publicly) available text corpus with markov-chains (or similiar stuff). My guess is the intention is to get ranking of search results near the top places. How? Well, it's on github (credible site) doesn't have links (not spam) so a corpus like this probably isn't spam elsewhere.

Of course "elsewhere" there are links in the text. But now the ranking is better and more likely to be found. So in the end it's a win for the spam blogs because now they get more hits/traffic.

The title of this submission ("Did you notice Github's Spamming") implies that Github is doing this. Is that the case, or rather is it the case that spammers are USING Github?

yes, Im sorry (eng. is not my native language). I do not want to imply it. Just create awareness that spammers are using it.

This just seems like spammers trying any publicly available outlet for spamming. It doesn't seem like a very successful one at that.

the big downside is that when you search in github all these adverts polute it. It seems there are many of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com