Over the past few days I’ve been getting a new species of comment spam. They’re meaningless strings of numbers and letters, often without links. I’ve been calling it GUID (globally unique identifiers) spam because that’s what they most resemble. Here’s a sample:
Website: 811b4a322b04 (IP: 67.159.44.134 , TE01.techentrance.com)
URL : http://811b4a322b04.us
Excerpt:
811b4a322b04…
811b4a322b040f05b8d5…
If you visit that URL, there’s apparently nothing there. Seeing as there are no links or keywords, what are they trying to accomplish?
I complained about this on Twitter, and Mark noted that it was like I was being ‘tagged’–a sort of GUID mark of the beast.
A lot of is coming via Tech Entrance, a hosting company of no apparentl fixed address.
Hi,
You may be unaware of this, but it’s inappropriate to post commercial messages as comments on a weblog without first contacting the weblog’s owner.
I am this weblog’s owner. With rare exceptions I don’t permit commercial messages in the comments associated with each article. So, I’ve deleted your comment. Next time, please contact me in the same way you would a journalist, to discuss the possibility of my writing about your project. Thanks. DB.
There’s a type of visitor–often but not always a small business owner–who randomly finds a page on my website and leaves a promotional message in the comments. The most recent example was a blurb to promote a new documentary on Tommy Douglas (posted to this page on my site).
By my definition (copped from Tim Bray)–unsolicited commercial email from people I don’t know–this qualifies as spam. However, it’s not like these people have a thousand zombified servers spitting out millions of blog comments. They’re not running spamming server farms from Abuja or Vladivostok. They’re just uninformed.
They probably read some SEO whitepaper that advised them to ‘leave messages in forums’ promoting their services, and that’s what they think they’re doing on my (and your) blog.
So, instead of identifying their comment as spam and ignoring it, I take the extra ten seconds to cut and paste this text into a reply and delete their comment. Most of them are highly apologetic when they get my message.
Do I ever accidentally reply to a real spammer? I don’t think so–it’s still pretty easy to tell the difference.
UPDATE: I tweaked the final sentence a bit to be a little more educational.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been receiving a new, particularly insidious kind of comment spam. They’re short, apparently legitimate comments, but posted in a systematic way to popular pages on the site. Here are some examples.
They mostly link to dodgy-looking Russian or eastern European websites or link farms.
The tricky part is that they refer to the blog post and are written by somebody with decent English. For example, on a post about the movie Eragon, the comment reads:
The book was written by a teenager. It’s a best seller.
By itself that would be legit, I guess, except that it links to a link farm and there are similar brief, benign comments by the same IP on other pages of my site.
I do regularly receive promotional comments on specific posts from business owners, but these are usually one-off messages from naive folks who don’t understand that they shouldn’t be leaving sales messages for their mortuary services (for example) anywhere they can. This comment spam is far more methodical.
I assume that companies are manually identifying popular pages on blogs, reading the posts, and posting contextual comments to attempt to improve their SEO (I use the ‘nofollow’ tag, so it won’t help them). I can’t imagine that that’s cost effective.
While searching for a solution to my aforementioned gallery comment spam problem (solution: delete all the comments and implement a captcha), I happened upon SpamPaint. It’s a German online art project:
Let’s assume a spam bot comes to a weblog and leaves a comment. Let’s also assume this blog is using the Akismet plugin to recognise spam. Now that the blog software knows it has been spammed it will either delete the comment spam or, if we are lucky and the blog is contributing to SpamPaint, it will be automatically sent to the SpamPaint engine.
After receiving the comment SpamPaint will analyse it. For example: comment spam nearly almost includes links to websites (after all, the intention of comment spam is to promote websites) so SpamPaint visits these sites and grabs the colors and some images. SpamPaint also checks from which country the spammer is and shows this in the generated graphics. That’s just two of many steps.
If not beautiful, at least the gallery is kind of fun. I quite liked this one.
