I’ve noticed an interesting trend in the comment spam I’ve been getting (luckily few of it gets through).
There seems to be three basic categories …
- Random words surrounded with links to drug sites.
- Often using the wrong URL markup for WordPress.
- The links are frequently pointing to some mismanaged forum site where the admin’s have lost the battle with the spammers
- Coherent looking spam that follows the same pattern over and over again (easy for anti-spam systems to catch).
- Duplication of previous comments on a post where the commenter name, email address, and URL, is to some other site (in recent cases, some drum manufacturer).
I’ve also noticed that, at least on my Google Apps email, the spam I’m getting frequently follows a very predictable pattern. You would think that the spammers, as clever as they are, would realize that using the same pattern over and over again will get their messages caught by anti-spam systems quite easily.
It still boggles my mind that possibly legitimate vendors think spamming is a valid marketing technique.
I’m with you on those last to points. The beauty of having multiple sites is that you can see the obvious patterns across the board. How knows how these actually make any money for the folks behind the bots.
What I think is neat is after the week or two of launching a new blog and waiting for the pages/posts to get indexed by Google, etc. then you get an onslaught of new spam all of a sudden. It’s like a validation that your site is now being indexed. 🙂
I was just hit with another round of “replica watches” spam. Fun times.
Oh yeah, another thing I just noticed … some REALLY clueless spammers use the commenter’s URL field for “http://website/”