Spam - Some Inspiration
Posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2006
Over the last couple of days, Akismet racked up the 1000th attempt at spamming this site in just 3 months. Only one of those was a false positive (sorry Hans).
Over the time I have spent deleting spam from the Akismet section I have come to wonder what the spammers get out of it. Some comments are gibberish and the majority (on this site anyway) are trying to sell either fake drugs or sex. How is this going to help anyone who reads this blog? Wordpress now includes rel="nofollow" in all comment URLs which means that Google will not give any credit to those URLs in it’s site rankings. So comment spam doesn’t affect their hallowed PageRank. What is in it for them?
There Must Be Something
Well, for a start Google seems to be the only search engine that respects the nofollow rule. Searching for link:www.unintentionallyblank.co.uk on MSN or Yahoo brings up loads of results, many of which I know, without even checking, employ rel="nofollow" in their links. These links are being indexed even by the biggest of the lesser search engines, which means they must feature somewhere in the ranking algorithms. To contrast, Google returns 13 results that link to this site and MSN returns 415.
Next, there is always the possibility that, like any advertising, someone browsing the afflicted comments section of a victim blog is indeed looking for viagra, free sex videos or picnic baskets. The fact that setting up a bot to send out comment spam is so cheap means that any returns are good ones.
What To Do?
Comment spam must have it’s benefits to the perpetrators so it won’t be stopping until we can remove it from all blogs/guestbooks/forums/wikis/etc. so until then, how do you deal with it? I use Akismet, is there anything better? What are your favourite comment spams that you have seen?
Thank you Yvonne for the inspiration.
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1October 2nd, 2006 at 4:27 am
Yvonne Says:Heh heh, thanks Phil :) I didn’t know MSN and Yahoo ignore the nofollow rule! stupid
I’ve been thinking about upgrading to Bad Behaviour. Right now, I’m using the Bannage plugin:
http://www.justinshattuck.com/bannage/
To ban IPs, but the spammers just change them around, so its hard to know what else to do! I’d also look at Spam Karma 2, but that one blocked pretty much every single comment that came through in my site, the first few days I used it.
Sigh :|
2October 3rd, 2006 at 10:07 am
Phil Says:Thanks for the link to bannage, I’ll see what I can do with that. What exactly does Bad Behaviour do though?
Oh, and I was lucky enough to get a comment which offered to show me what the Matrix was last night, sadly it turned out to be a mix between black jack and tramadol.
3October 3rd, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Yvonne Says:To be honest, I don’t know if BB is better than Akismet, but I’ve heard great things about it.
Would you believe that after posting the spam story, about 10 spam got through Akismet? Gah!
4October 3rd, 2006 at 3:16 pm
Phil Says:Classic, it’s almost as if they’d planned it. They probably weren’t as poetic either.
To contrast, they seem to have completely left me alone now. How strange.
5October 4th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Hans Says:No it’s alright Phil. Infact I didn’t know that it was Akismet who swallowed my comment but moreover comment moderation. I thought that you’ve enabled such options(specifying the number of links that are allowed in a comment else keep it for moderation).
I think spammers have good reason to do this : money but I don’t actually know how they get it. Some time back I read something on Newsweek where they’ve interviewed the director of a company which specialised in sending ads through mails,comments,etc(yeah that’s spamming). But guess what? The man was making I don’t know how much of dollars per day and was riding one of these cars. The guy was getting rich through spamming. When he was questionned why and whether he didn’t have any remorse, he just said that it was work and if the persons didn’t want to see the spam, then they can just delete it.
I think they probably do this based on a game of chance. That mere chance that something might get through even if they know we’re gonna delete those spams. I mean why send them again and again if you already know we gonna delete them and resort to violent means to their shit.
Hey talking about spam, I think the community should give this topic a bit more of an attention. Some days back, there was a comment(spam indeed) which was just shining there and my Akismet didn’t detect it so because it just used a very cunning technique. Redirection. The address specified in the url redirected to some other shit site when clicked. Then how did it get in? It just said great work in the comment so no links inside : a humble and nice comment. But still spam.