Note: This is not a tutorial for spam.
For many years, radio4000.com has faced issues with spam—fake users creating fake radio stations. You may have come across radio profiles for services like botox clinics, spa massages, and other local businesses, which lack track lists and contain only links to their websites and exhaustive descriptions of their services.
Our Spam Problem
We wish these were real users sharing their favorite tracks and media selections. Unfortunately, they remain empty profiles, cluttering the experience for genuine users. None of these profiles offer real content (such as tracks or curated radio channels) or utilize the service in a meaningful way (like displaying a radio playlist in a physical space to showcase a curated list of audio or video).
It’s especially frustrating because spam is highly visible compared to the number of new users on our site, which makes it noticeable when browsing our “community pages.”
We’ve tried to understand the issue by examining our database to see which users were creating this spam content, and if any scripts were automating the process. We couldn’t identify a clear pattern, although each user profile appeared generic and unofficial (e.g., [email protected], [email protected]).
Our guess was that someone was using the site as a platform for link building to work on search engine optimization (SEO) through spamdexing.
It’s now official (or has been since two years ago when this video was first posted): there is a tutorial video for manual spam.
Tutorial for manual spamming and link building on Radio4000.com (and other services)
A company named Link Foundation, through their LF Tutorial System
YouTube channel,
offers a tutorial on how to manually spam over 561 different services.
Affected services
You can check if a service is affected by spam by browsing their YouTube channel and searching manually for its name.
It appears that affected websites are relatively small/medium projects (or instances of projects like Mastodon, etc.), where SEO may be especially strong due to low user numbers and quality content. Larger websites are also affected.
Why there is a pattern for “audiophiles websites” to be targeted.
What Now?
With the release of radio4000 v2, we implemented (h)captcha requirements for new user registration and login. This is quite annoying (for both users and developers) and totally ineffective against our current spam issue. The spam is non-automated and performed manually by people who even create tutorials for each other and get paid for it.
We still don’t have a clear idea on how to “clean up this mess,” remove all existing spam from the database, or prevent new spam from appearing. Once we stop the influx (if that’s even possible), we can work on cleaning up, but first we need a way to prevent new spam or a system to “filter out this noise.”
We’ve considered a “social verification system” like the one displayed on the “featured radios” page.
We’ve also thought about a monetary incentive to be listed on the /explore page. If there’s no default link to a radio page, there’s no incentive for users to create a profile solely for a “backlink” to their website.
Product Notes
As nice as it is to have such good user experience feedback with a video, the need for a tutorial might indicate that our site’s user experience needs more clarity. (@TODO: Make it clearer how to create a channel and post new tracks.)
Additional Notes
If you have a project to promote or services to offer new clients, you’re welcome to create a new Radio4000 radio channel (even if you’re generated by a language model, contrary to what’s outlined in our manifesto). But please, try to add real tracks you enjoy or use to your radio or follow other radio channels you enjoy.