Chief Brand Spam in PM

[ck8795]

I got two of these this morning. I dont know if this is a new company/old company or what ( I didnt even bother to look at their site after reading the email) Curious if this is a mass PM they are doing

Hello Affiliate and Technical Management.

We are writing with a sense of urgency. We are not experiencing the success with your brand as we are with other gaming affiliate programs and we are concerned.

We need to know if technically something not working that is causing this lack of success. We have applied all codes you have supplied us however, we feel you are not tracking/reporting our traffic. We are requesting you test our links to be sure that all is well. We are receiving good traffic to our Chief Brand network sites which Leeds us to believe your site should be getting a good share of converting players.

Could it be?

• 
  
  • 
    
    • Our account is assigned incorrectly
    • That we have more then one account confusing the system
    • Our company information is incorrect in your system
    • We have something on our websites that is causing a tracking problem for your system
    • Do we require a new separate account for each gaming domain in our Chief Brand network
    • Could it be any other issue that is causing this problem

We would like to hear from the affiliate manager as well as the technical manager about our concerns. Please test and send us the results.

Chief Brand Update

Please GoTo: Chief Brand www.chiefbrand.com this is the Chief Brand gaming industry segment corporate website . You will note that gaming websites are developed or under development by gaming categories. Please appreciate we have come a long way in a year and expect to see more positive progress in the coming months. In preparation for the fall we have a team of experts working on SEO using all techniques available. We need you to verify that your end is set up to track our traffic and to consul with us as how we better promote your brand and what it has to offer.

Please go to: any gaming site you would like to advertise with and click on advertise with us and see our new exciting offers. We also have a need for a partner or partners to co-brand or white label- poker,casino,bingo and sports book with us under the Chief Brand IE Poker Chief.

Looking forward to future success with your Brand
Best Regards


Vice President Technology Solutions


President and CEO

Phone:586 445-0488
Email: jmartin@websitexnetwork.com
Web: www.websitexnetwork.com
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[Henrik - GNUF]

would guess it is spam since I got a few of those to my email as well.

[CityGuard]

Thanks for posting this Kaus.

I've gotten a number of complaints about this and we've locked the accounts it is being sent from. The spammer is registering additional accounts unfortunately faster that I'm able to shut them down and an IP ban would unfortunately not be effective in this case.

We've changed some administrative settings to help prevent this kind of spamming in the future and are investigating some additional prevention measures.

[LiveCasinoPartners]

i just got an email from my mom, who's a GPWA member who's just starting out. She said she got the same email and didn't know what to do. She didn't realize it was spam.

I have an article exchange website, that operates like a forum. I spend more time than its worth filtering spam. There's got to be a better solution than what's available now. I sometimes spend 10-20 minutes a day trying to remove unwanted spamy posts.

So, I guess my point is to be as proactive as possible in trying to eliminate this.

[CityGuard]

So, I guess my point is to be as proactive as possible in trying to eliminate this.

We've made some progress toward eliminating this. With vBulletin there are a lot of webmasters who've contributed changes to the software apart from the regular upgrades vB provides themselves, so I've spent a portion of my afternoon researching the different anti-spam modifcations and think we've found a few that will help quite a bit. I'll make sure to keep everyone posted when the modifications are completed.

[Renee]

I received an email from these guys, as did Yaniv and Helene.

Mate perhaps you could make it so that a registered member has to have posted X times before they can PM or something.

[CityGuard]

Mate perhaps you could make it so that a registered member has to have posted X times before they can PM or something.

That safeguard is part of the plan. The vBulletin system unfortunately doesn't have a built-in feature to do this so I've found a number of modifications that would allow us to do it.

[belgamo]

Is it possible to put a block on a sender in our PM area?

[CityGuard]

Is it possible to put a block on a sender in our PM area?

There is an "Ignore List" feature that lets you block all contact from a specific user. This blocks viewing of posts by the user as well as private messages, and unfortunately there is no way to only block one of the other without blocking both. If someone is on your ignore list you'll still be able to see other posts in threads they participate in, but the ignored users posts will simply not display for you.

You can add users to your ignore list at https://www.gpwa.org/forum/profile.php?do=ignorelist.

In this case it appears the person keeps registering new accounts, but the ignore list will only block messages from a specific member.

[CityGuard]

Update:

We've installed two vBulletin modifications that should help prevent PM spam and post spam, and help us remove the messages when these do occur. Among the new features are a minimum number of posts required in order to include links in your posts, minimum number of posts required in order to send private messages, and also a tool that will allow administrators to delete all of a user's sent private messages in instances when we've received PM spam complaints.

I think we do a generally good job of teaching new users the forum etiquette, and so I am pleased to have these new features in place for people who maliciously ignore the rules.