A new breed of comment spam

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2004 at 12:33 AM and is filed under Running a website.

I came across a new breed of comment spam recently. The spammer copied the exact same name and comment content as another comment that already existed on that post and only changed the URL (and, of course, the IP address). I’ve banned their IP and added an additional word to the list of words that are not permitted in URLs, but this is disturbing me.

It means the comment spammers no longer care about the link containing relevant text - they just want increased linkage. This is very bad. Earlier I had suggested that perhaps I would only post links if the page that was linked to had an RSS feed. I’m thinking that now what I will do is say that if people want links, they need to enter in their e-mail address into a link request form and the link will be mailed to them. I realize this is a bit draconian, but I believe it should be effective. The reason why I’m backing down from the requiring RSS feeds on the links is because it just suggests/fosters a technological arms race, which I don’t want to create.

Now, we can try to do a community based thing and I can try to start hacking WordPress to share the same sort of file as Mt-Blacklist does, but this hardly seems like a good solution. I want an automated thing that doesn’t need to be updated much, and isn’t dependant on another site.

Any great ideas? This sort of comment spam isn’t one that I recall hearing about elsewhere, but I’m a bit behind on my blog reading, I confess. Too much stuff going on in the “real world”.

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Richard MacManus Says:
February 11th, 2004 at 2:43 PM

that is worrying. Was it someone replicating my comment to your post a few days ago? Because I did notice when I last checked that my comment was showing up twice. However I assumed I had mistakenly pressed “Submit” twice or something. So I’m glad you picked it up and have now deleted the offending spam comment. I really wonder why people do this sort of thing - are spammers who do this really making money out of this?? I sometimes wonder whether it’s just people with no morals who do it for the thrill. It really is irritating to normal people though.

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Andrew Says:
February 11th, 2004 at 2:52 PM

Yes, that was the comment. Increased linkage means increased search engine results (although it is far more effective if the link text is relevant) and increased search engine results means increased traffice which potentially means increased sales. The URL in question was to a store that sold certain … adult … products.

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G-Fry Says:
February 11th, 2004 at 5:29 PM

Heh. More important things in the real world. How silly.

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Read/Write Web Says:
February 12th, 2004 at 4:46 AM

[…] nt.com/wiki/FrontPage”>Bill Seitz’s WikiLog has been
hammered this week and href="http://www.andrewsw.com/news/index.php?p=510&c=1">Andrew Chen
noticed this morning a new trick. A spammer&nbsp […]

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Candy Daniels Says:
February 12th, 2004 at 5:51 PM

Very sad indeed….btw…in another blog I commented on there was a previous comment that simply listed lost of porn links. A very long one btw. I believe it was the “Trust (Was: More Gender-Relations Speculations” I think.

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ij Says:
February 13th, 2004 at 1:22 PM

Hi Andrew, Just read your latest post, quote: “…bit behind on my blog reading, I confess. Too much stuff going on in the “real world”. …” Hah! Well done :)) Look forward to catching up on the rest of your posts ;)

Seems like these spammers do succeed in increasing traffic to their sites - one British MP blogger recently got a dozen or more spams in two different political posts - the posts sounded like they were written by Aliens but they had sender names like “Enoch” - and it almost made you wonder if the mathematical sounding post was actually from some serious readers. I clicked into one of the names and it led to the most vile stuff you could imagine and a real twisted bunch of people. But I guess a few readers would be curious if they got to the site by mistake and would read the horrifying stuff, just out of being astounded, shocked, nosey and curious…which means it is worthwhile for the spammers to spam.

I hate even the thought of my machine getting polluted with accessing those sort of sites and my ISP or whatever showing up there. It’s certainly a shock when it happens. I’ve only had a few spams and only on political posts that mentioned a foreign country - the links led to quite ordinary sites so I can’t imagine what their game is, unless they are just trying to increase page rank or google standing.

Recently I blogged a post where Bill Gates was talking about email postage being the only solution within a few years … What do you think about email postage?

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Andrew Says:
February 13th, 2004 at 3:04 PM

I think the solution is not e-mail postage. We shouldn’t harm the many to deal with the sins of a few. I think instead, the solution is to engage in more flagrant vigilantism. This is the “old west” sort of cowboy-like internet. I think spammers should have distributed denial-of-service attacks launched against their sites, for a start. I have more drastic measures in mind, and for any spammer that is reading this, consider it a warning. You will regret messing with me if you continue to do so.

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ij Says:
February 14th, 2004 at 11:00 AM

Yes, I agree: no email postage. One thing I’ve noticed is some comments - or even messages from Yahoo Groups that people have written amongst themselves - showing up on Google pages, which means that spammers leaving comments must also get to show up on Google pages. Do you think it would be possible for Google to stop showing comments on their pages - and if bloggers immediately deleted spam - it would provide less of an incentive for spammers? What are spammers actually getting out of spamming - readers clicking into them out of curiousty or what. Wonder if its technically possible to bounce their spams straight back to where they came from so the machines (or whatever the set up is for spamming) get all overloaded and clogged up? Whenever I get the Nigerian spams I just want to bounce it back - so they have to take care of deleting their own rubbish - but am afraid by doing that it, exposes my email address even further. Wish there was a way for me - and everyone else - to do this without exposing their existing email addresses.

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Andrew Says:
February 14th, 2004 at 11:19 AM

So, if comments are in a separate window/page, and the template for the comment page has an appropriate meta-tag indicating that search engines shouldn’t index the page, then that would work. However, the thing is, I don’t think all comment spammers are smart enough to know that it wouldn’t work.

Immediately deleting spam is one of the many things that could also help, but the fact of the matter is, eventually it may reach a point where supporting comments just isn’t worth it any more.

The typical click through rate for something like a banner-ad is about 0.1%. If a comment spammer posts on 100 websites, each of which get 1000 views per day, then that means they get about 100 clicks - possibly per day. If the average “buy through” ratio (percentage of clicks/impressions that become sales) is about 1% then if a sale of a single product makes $20 then it quite possibly pays for the hour or two of posting 100 comment spams. If the sale is of a recurring service (such as membership in an internet porn site) then it quite possibly pays for a lot more than that.

As for e-mail spam - I’m thinking crackdowns on the companies that allow such things to happen - by, say, for example, having major ISPs blacklist the IP addresses of companies that are party to spam - will be the only effective long-term solution. On a per company basis, we can organize letter-writing campaigns, and see how well that works. I used to do that a bit (e-mail letters to abuse@ whatever) but haven’t gotten around to recently as I’ve been more busy than I’d like.

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