What is it with comment spam? I just deleted almost 400 from my site, and every one came from a different web address. Of course, that simply means one person used 400 other addresses to send them. They all had something to do with casinos on line.
I can understand that “You can make up to $400 a week using your home computer!” means people are paying folks to do such things. In email, a receiver may actually read the message and, in a very small percentage, act on it. It must accomplish what the marketer wants, or it would no longer exist.
But to send comment spam seems to be one of the dumbest ploys around. The only person who sees it is the site owner, and if I get spam, I delete it without reading it. Even if I did read it, I would be too pissed to ever participate in whatever marketing scheme they offer.
So, what does it accomplish?
A lot of site owners don’t have the same comment moderation settings you do, or they’re just lax about moderating their comments and accidentally let some slip through… so if a spammy comment makes it onto the page even for a few days before the owner deletes it, then the links they’ve placed in those comments serve to increase PageRank of the site that the spammers are linking to. It’s a form of Google bomb, really… something I recall a little recent, er, discussion about on this site. Regarding traditional e-mail spam:
Damn stright. If you’re making $10 a sale, and you send to millions upon millions of e-mail addresses, then a very, very low response rate can still make you a very rich spammer. Sad but true.
Comment by Bogey — November 5, 2004 @ 1:53 pm
I dare say that in the main, the only ones who make real money are the Spammers/commentspammers who set the service up and convince other morons to use them. I’m fairly certain that applies to Spam having done 1000’s of hours of researching who is sending them. Of course a lot of the spam these days comes thru Russia and China and so a high degree of it is just plain criminal cons. The only way to put a dent in it all is for the trunkline carriers like Verio and ATT to somehow be held accountable if they knowing allow spam thru their systems. Which they do.
Comment by Wallace-Midland Texas — November 5, 2004 @ 3:39 pm
Normally I’d get on Whois and track down the service. This time every one came from a different IP address.
Comment by Mike — November 5, 2004 @ 5:29 pm
I hate to recommend you to go this route, but do what I do with my photoblog (I’ve disabled comments entirely on my regular site): after a week or so, simply disable them. I know, comments are part of my joy, too, and I know many people post even a year after the fact, but you gotta do whatcha gotta do). It’s one of the bad things about MT. I noticed Allah started doing it a while back, too.
Comment by Jeremiah (Esotericus) — November 6, 2004 @ 10:32 am
Instead of disable, I should have said “close”.
Comment by Jeremiah (Esotericus) — November 6, 2004 @ 10:34 am
I don’t intend to close the comments. But I need to determine the best time-scale to use in WordPress for closing them out. WP allows me to set a time or number of comments to close down commenting on any given post. The tough part about it is that I had some good discussions going with old Air Force types regarding Tony McPeak months after writing about him. When he jumped from Dean to Kerry, a lot of old farts showed up to make their views known.
Comment by Bunker — November 6, 2004 @ 2:22 pm