Hidden Tracking

[Barbarosa]

More and more I am seeing posts on Calguns saying, Reported so and so for "hidden tracking bot", or "embedded tracker", things like that. Almost immediately the moderators delete the offending post.

What are these things, what do they do, how do I avoid them, and why can some people find them while they don't appear to others?

[Garv]

Some noobs come in with posts copied from our regulars and add the tracker image.
You can see it by opening their post from their user profile.

If it is a new person, I often check if their posts just do not sound right.

[glockman19]

Get a good virus program and firewall.

[Red-Osier]

I hit select all if the post is suspect and it shows up.

[QuarterBoreGunner]

Technically called 'web beacons' or 'web bugs' they are an extremely small (usually 1x1 pixel) image that spammers can use to track who has viewed the image and sometimes harvest emails and other tracking data.

The giveaway is that the automated spammer agent will usually copy a previous post in a thread and inject the image tag in it. This is why you see "new members" with single posts that are the same as previous posters. Often the spammer agent software will *break* the image tag (because that is some janky code written by **** coders) and you'll see the 'image not found error' also.

More info here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon

EDIT: ALSO! If you suspect a tracking image spammer, report it! BUT DO NOT QUOTE IT! When you quote it, you are copying the tracking image link and are now effectively the spammer yourself. If we delete the original tracking spammer post and not yours with the copied tracking image, it does nothing. You are now the tracking spammer.

[six seven tango]

It's really fairly easy to spot them, even without seeing the tracker image. All of the ones that I have seen (with or without image) have taken part of an earlier post in the thread and copied it. A lot of times, the part they take makes no sense when posted by itself. For example, if I take part of Barbarosa's OP

Almost immediately the moderators delete the offending post.

and post it by itself (without the quote box), it doesn't make sense without the rest of the post. When you see something like that from someone with a low post count, just hit "select all" like mentioned above to confirm the tracker image. I've seen some of these guys with 30-40 posts before they get caught, so it isn't always just 1 or 2 post wonders.

[gogohopper]

reported !