Soylent spam is people!
One of the joys of relaunching the debabblog is that the blog spammers have started discovering me. The same concerned citizens who email to check on my mortgage interest rate and the size and functionality of certain aspects of my personage must feel like I'm not paying attention, so they've helpfully decided to post their concerns on my blog as well.Of course, I knew this would happen sooner or later, so I decided to put in some clever traps soon after I launched the site. There's a built-in timing mechanism, a fake button, and other bits of code I've been toying with to keep the spammers from automatically posting with programs/bots.
To my surprise, it made no difference at all, and I racked my brain to figure out why. Then it hit me: these spammers aren't programs at all; they're REAL PEOPLE! All of the data supports the notion that these spammers are actual people taking the time to cut and paste garbage links into a site that automatically rejects them (thanks to secret trap #3).
I'm baffled. I can understand spam, at least the kind that actually pitches a product or scam, as stealing bandwidth to send millions of emails is cheap and easy. Posting nonsense on a blog, though, takes time, and the hit rate must be pathetically low. It's also just plain sad, career-wise. Here's hoping that 2007 is the year that spammers finally get a life (or at least a girlfriend).
Kevin
· Wednesday, January 3Oooohhh boy. You'd be surprised what people in third world countries would be willing... no, happy to do for 25 cents a day. Spamming can be done even by the illiterate.
Speaking about that, I'm curious where the spam IPs are coming from. I'd only be surprised if they were U.S. or Western European IPs. Then again, they're probably masking their IPs anyway so we can't really know for sure.
Dr. Pete
· Wednesday, January 3I honestly do suspect that it's being outsourced, especially given the quality of the writing. Most of the spam posts start with some vague, badly worded compliment, such as "I want to thank your page, it good!" (that's a real example, sadly). I haven't bothered to track IP's, and am hesitant to doing anything that will impede legitimate readers (waiting for a comment to be moderated, email confirmation, etc.) but will probably have to go one of those routes.