Has anyone else been getting a lot of flattering spam messages in their comments lately?:
I dont even remember how i reached your site but it doesnt matter, cause i’m so happy i found it, it really made me think, keep up the good work
I’ve deleted dozens of anonymous comments along those lines this week. I don’t know what the benefit to spammers is (there’s no URL in the comment), but I have a theory: They’re trying to get around the WordPress 1.5 spam-blocking system, and similar systems like it. In these systems, the first post by a new comment-writer must be approved by the blogger, but future posts by that same writer are automatically approved. The goal is to get me to approve a few of these anonymous, adoring comments; and then in a month or two hit me with hundreds of Texas hold’em spam or whatever.
That’s my theory, anyway.
YES! I have wordpress too, but not the updated spam blocking one. I manually approve all my comments and I’ve been seeing TONS of these crazy spams. It’s absolutely rediculous…I approved the first few, thinking: “this is random” but then I started marking them all as spam and deleteing them all. I think you’re theory might be right, we’ll see. Anywho, check out my site and I’ll keep checking out yours.
~Keith
I’ve found a few blogs where you can’t put in a blogspot URL because of spam. Weird. I didn’t even know “comment spam” was a phenomenon.
I haven’t run across the problem you’re describing. I guess you have to have a popular blog for that to happen? :)
It’s a strong possibility. Another hypothesis is that the spammers are collecting information on anti-spamming modules and this is one of many experiments.
At least, if I were a spammer, that would be my approach: shotgun the Internet with a thousand experiments and see how they do, then refine my algorithms accordingly. If this theory is right, then look for a second wave of adoring messages that DO contain links; the text of the adoration will be whatever had the highest percentage of acceptance from the first wave.
And could it be that your blog was passed around to real live honest to goodness people who enjoyed it and wanted to comment?
I hate spam as much as everyone else but this seems just a wee bit obsessive. And, I’ve just decided I’m pulling you off of my feeds because I wouldn’t want any of my fr ends to accidentally comment positively on something you said and immediately be considered a spammer.
Denise, much as I’d like to believe that 13 people, all anonymous, all with email addresses like “borad3251@mail.com,” happened to drop by and compliment “Alas” with compliments that just happened to have no bearing on the threads they were leaving the comment on, all in the last half-hour or so… I don’t buy it.
In the time I wrote the above paragraph, three more appeared. At 5am on a Sunday morning. Trust me, it’s spam, not human.
Plus, if you pay attention you see that there are repeated comments. For instance, this one:
What are the odds of multiple posters just happening to leave that exact comment word for word?
I’ve had thousands of these, lately (some autodeleted; many not), as have a few other WPians. No clue how to stop them, but it’s sort of annoying, because there is occasionally a real comment caught in the filter.
So you recognize a new spam scheme, are nice enough to alert us about it, and “denise” decides to withdraw her precious approval because of it? :rolleyes:
Oh, poor Alas, A Blog! You are doomed to die a certain death because you’re pulled off her feed! We’ll miss you!
But on a more serious note, thanks for the heads up on this. Now we can all spot the telltale signs and not fall for it.
brilliant deduction, holmes! i concur.
oh yes, and: can’t remember how but i just found your blog and i like it very much. :o]
I can never figure out why spamming itself is somehow going to endear the product being spammed to the person who has to deal with the spam, either blog host or blog visitor. It’s sort of like me openly dumping rotting garbage all over the neighbor’s front yard and then trying to sell the angry neighbor my stellar services as professional yard-cleaner.
I don’t get it. I know that enough people must respond to this stuff, or spammers wouldn’t keep doing it, but I don’t understand why people respond. Why would they want to give their hard-earned money to a garbage-dumping intruder ? Yarrgh.
Actually Amp, I’ve deleted about forty of those from here as well, and have taken note that several of them share the same IP.
They are (btw) very obviously spam posts that haven’t yet shown their full purpose yet, but it’s extremely clear that they aren’t normal comments. Most come from ‘anonymous’.
As I understand it, for many spammers, the goal is to just get the link out there. Google ranks pages partly by how many links there are to a page; by creating thousands of spam links to their site, spammers hope to increase their google ranking.
Ugh. What gets me is that on my blog, comments arent indexed by google so there is no point for the spammers to constantly leave comments to posts that are over a year old. No one reads them, not even google. Yet, they do it anyways and I deleted them and they post some more and I delete them and so on and so on forever.
But, fwiw, I dont even remember how i reached your site but it doesnt matter, cause i’m so happy i found it, it really made me think, keep up the good work. ;)
Ampersand is right on several counts here. Some points (I’ve been fascinated by blog spam for a long time… pisses me off but the whole thing fascinates me)
1. comment spam helps the spammer because it increases their site’s search engine ranking.
2. My blog only gets about 200 visits a day and I get about 2,000 comment spams a day (most all blocked now thank goodness).
3. This type of comment (fake appreciation) is known now and exactly what Ampersand says the reason is he postulated. Denise, you jumped to a conclusion way too unfairly.
Trey
And it looks like the spammers figured it out. Or at least “Available-credit” did.
BTW, very nice to see Alas back early!
And i love your site. keep up the good work. ; )
Amp wrote:
So does having a high google rating through these thousands of links = More sales of “Giavara”/other miracle drug du jour ?
Is it all about ego, or sales ?
[scratches head]
I use TypePad. I’ve occasionally gotten trackback spam, but I’ve never had any comment spam. I guess that’s one of the benefits of being an obscure, small-time blogger (although I did have an impressive 15 minutes of fame the last time I got a link from you!).
By the way, finding your site was the greatest day of my life. It restored my faith in the internet and in humanity as a whole. It also cleared up my acne and increased my breast size.
Full automatic spam is everywhere out in the internet. Coming in from everywhere…
You will find it in email-accounts, guestbooks, blogs…..a great deal of annoyance.
All what you can do about it is to delete it.
If you cannot delete such data-garbage anymore manually, you have to delete it automatically (by buying some software, yes, spam-mailer-delete- programs are also a good business for the software-industry!)
In the time I wrote the above paragraph, three more appeared. At 5am on a Sunday morning. Trust me, it’s spam, not human.
Don’t forget your 5am isn’t everybody’s, dependent upon where in the world you are.
I’ve never had the problem but anyway, you’ve got a great blog.