thisis was a keyword spam post that had 9 replies in earnest. After pointing that out, user @Taurus even found it was templated off a high ranking and similar user question on reddit.
For the spammers it’s about having word proximity of their brand or product to the h1 question “What is the best..”, "Best App .. " or “Top App ..” and getting the signal of a high ranking site.
User forums are high ranking because the incentives to write have no hidden goals.
Astroturfing on forums isn’t new, but now spammers do it too to get incorporated into the embeddings of language models to come up on querying. They don’t need the spam backlink anymore.
And if a post looks like astroturfing, I would suggest that forum members flag it as potential spam, so a moderator can review it. It can always be unhidden if it checks out.
but those are genuine imo I don’t want to be paranoid, this is a help forum so if there’s an angle to help.. my issue with the screenshotted post is malignant seo (“geo”?) people blatantly profitting of a place like that.
Moderation tools of discourse do not allow to keep a thread if the creating user is deleted (or the user does so himself/herself) afaik - sad the genuine 9 answers couldn’t be kept, wonder if there’s a method to do so.
Perhaps, but Astroturfing is a wide field and I suspect eOS / Murena is targeted from different angles and interests.Thank you for supporting some hands-on field studies :- )
This one surely got some smell…on the other hand perhaps it is only some expression of ….I don’t dare to write or even don’t know ;- )
seems authentic (and kind of interesting) - maybe I shouldn’t have written astroturfing, the example was spam, just without a linkback so it wasnt straightforward.
I don’t want to be paranoid, this is a help forum so if there’s an angle to help.. my issue with the screenshotted post is malignant seo (“geo”?) people blatantly profitting of a place like that.