Comment blather ads
November 6th, 2003
I’m always excited to see someone put up a comment on a blog entry, but I’ve now been disappointed to see that there’s a new form of spam: comment spam. Rather than send me an e-mail trying to get me to click some link, the spammer puts up a comment on a post. Their comment is full of ridiculous text, seemingly generated to put in as many links to various other commercial sites as possible. Bleah. I can of course delete the comments, but still, yuck. I wonder who they think is el stupido enough to go through those links? Or is it actually some other scheme to try to get those sites up higher in hit counts for search engines due to them being mentioned across various pages? I wonder how sites are targetted for this kind of thing - is there some web crawler out there that just randomly picks blogs and somehow submits comments? Or is some human being paid some amount of money to be web scum and troll the Net for sites to, essentially, graffiti?
If you’ve got some insight, I’m interested. I’d love to somehow turn the scheme around on these folks - become a pain in their electronic neck in the same way that they’re a pain in mine.
Entry Filed under: BizExecToBe
3 Comments
1. Ken | November 7th, 2003 at 11:25 am
You hit the nail on the head on your second attempt. From what I understand, they don’t actually think you’ll click on the links, although I’m sure that does happen on some high traffic blogs. It’s all about influencing search engines.
If you haven’t noticed, Movable Type is already looking into this problem. I truly hope they come up with a good solution.
2. Porter | November 11th, 2003 at 1:59 pm
And while they’re working on it, if you haven’t already, you might want to look into the MT-Blacklist filter:
http://www.jayallen.org/misc/projects/mt-blacklist/
It’s pretty sad that you can’t open up a public forum for expression of any kind or in any medium without having to deal with crap like this.
3. Porter | November 11th, 2003 at 2:02 pm
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention this link as well:
http://kalsey.com/2003/11/comment_spam_manifesto/
“Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated.
“Bloggers will track you down and notify your hosting providers about your activities. We will tell your ISPs what you are using their connections for. We will let the makers of the products you are advertising know of your despicable sales methods. We will hit you where it hurts by attacking your source of income.”