CV’s spam filter has been a tad bit overenthusiastic these days, so I’ve recently had to troll through the spam to retrieve misfiled comments. As expected, the spam is a morass of viagra ads and truly horrid lists of porn-related search terms (where “horrid” means “things that Dan Savage would not approve of”). But lurking in there is a new breed of affirmation spam:
Warm greetings! Thanks for all the information, a very nice and well done site! Cheers.
I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to create this internet website. It has been extremely helpful
Moreover, now that they’re tired of thinking only of on-line casino gambling, spammers seem to wish to join the CV conversation:
Hey!, what made you want to write on Best Calculator Ever | Cosmic Variance? I was wondering, because I have been thinking about this since last Sunday.
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Post: Juan Collar on Dark Matter Detection | Cosmic Variance, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
I am not sure that I can completely understand your comments. Would you be so kind as to expand on your reasoning a little more before I comment.
Sometimes, though, the spammers enthusiasm for our work transcends their usual respectful admiration:
Hello, What a beautiful and awesome site. I adore what you’ve done with your setup and graphics. Thanks you so much.
You really poses much expertise on nalize Public Schools | Cosmic Variance. I really enjoyed going through your posting. I really appreciate it.
I love everything about this site!!
And at least among the spammers, our work is being appreciated.
Thank you. You have helped someone more than you could know.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:05 am
Let me just say: I’m confused. Is this a joke?
May 12th, 2008 at 3:16 am
I must say, I appreciate this post of yours Julianne.
I second the above poster’s query, if that makes sense.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:17 am
Ah, this is really annoying because you should know that Being slagged off is good for you
Yeah, we too have these comments. Occasionally I have to delete one that doesn’t get caught. As I must have said several times previously, I believe that spam is a good indicator for the decline of civilization, see On the Emergence of Lies.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:34 am
Now imagine these comments machine-translated into some other language sufficiently different from English.
Something like: “Great location! Thank yourself. Friend now became fan!”… well, sort of.
Well, actually that’s better, because it makes manual spam filtering much easier. You couldn’t make up those garbled sentences if you wanted to.
May 12th, 2008 at 7:35 am
Thank you, this article has helped me so much!
May 12th, 2008 at 8:43 am
I wonder why we never receive spam advertising illegal drugs like e.g. cocaine. Surely most drugs users would rather buy their dope directly by mail-order from the drugs producers rather than from the drugs dealers on the streets? But drugs dealers don’t seem to be very active on cyberspace.
The only thing I could find is this online shop which sells coca leaves products like coca tea etc.
May 12th, 2008 at 9:26 am
This is not a joke. These are real messages from spammers, trying to build up links to their “return address” on the comment. The return address will be something like “http://cheap-viagra-on-line.com”.
But trust me. They’re much better than the rest of the scary stuff.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
One trouble rarely noted is that these people give Spam a bad name. Though, if I had to choose, I would prefer Web users call it spam rather than, say, velveeta.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
I’ve gotten this kind of spam before. I was confused at first. Some guy was asking me to add him to my blogroll, and I was taken aback at the apparent ignorance of common blogging etiquette. Then I realized it was a spammer.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
For all you Monty Python fans out there:
Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam
Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam
Spam, Spam, (Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam!) Spam, Spam
http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2Fvideoplay%3Fdocid%3D2496293981990713675&ei=M80oSPmTMpiQ8wSto8DLCw&usg=AFQjCNE2t4z7Bm3Tfw09bYQ1KuXATmm8mg&sig2=NpYTGan39WctAWYySqtNyg
May 12th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Ooh I get it now (reply to #7). I thought you could have made that a little clearer by posting the URL there.
Anyway, I also got random comments like “I like this. See [here].” where “here” is a link to some disguised URL bent on spreading evil (for the lack of a better word). Apparently, these disappeared when I stopped posting my blog links onto Facebook. Figures!
May 13th, 2008 at 5:33 am
The usenet groups have been beset by spam for years, and as you say some is pretty objectionable (including blatant ads for illegal things like kiddie porn).
In addition to the obvious suggestion of capchas, here’s an idea to reduce the incentive for spammers to target your blog – Have your software translate all links that appear in comments to a URL to one of your pages, with the link as an argument, and use a robots.txt file to tell Google and other search engines to ignore that page.
Example: if the spammer cites URL “linka”, your blog software translates that to “cv.com/redirect.php/?linka”, where search engines will ignore redirect.php page.
You could also give your readers the option to display a list of these links, in the context they arose, and click on entries that were spam. That way you could enlist your readers to help you winnow out the pesky spammers!
May 13th, 2008 at 6:13 am
Forgot to add – A URL could not be marked up, only ratcheted down. So a spammer couldn’t distort the results by promoting their own links.
Also, if say three or more people (at distinct IP addresses) voted a URL as spam then the domain name could be added to a “rogue list” (shared between multiple blogs?) and the comment and link removed, and prevented from appearing in future.
The only flaw might be spammers voting down kosher links, out of spite. But noting IP addresses of voters would hamper them in that. Another approach, to validate genuine physicist voters, would be to ask a multiple choice question to which only a physicist is likely to know the answer (which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be a bad capchta technique for CV comments in the first place!)
May 13th, 2008 at 10:50 am
What a touching work! This has moved me in a way that I had hitherto only attributed to sexual arousal.
(Yes, it’s a joke.)
May 13th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
Another way to fight spam is by simply loading the advertized webpage over and over again. If a spammer sends millions of emails containg a link and everyone who receives that mail were to do this then that amounts to a massive DDOS attack
May 13th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
apparently, hackers like you, too.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Given how many machines are compromised and work as a part of botnet, I am amazed that e-mail and internet actually works at all. Now 95%+ of all e-mail volume is spam.
One of more amusing spam developments are fake blogs that copy and paste at random from real blogs and web pages. Of course nobody sane reads those gibberish blogs – you end up there by search engines getting fooled. I wonder how the profitability of this scheme is supposed to work…
May 14th, 2008 at 6:31 am
They’re called “link farms” – they build up a Google rating, and get paid to link to other sites to boost theirs.
There’s also the ones that copy whole Wikipedia articles into posts…
May 14th, 2008 at 9:53 am
I wonder if the spam percentage of email is close to the ratio of endogenous retro viruses in the human genome.
Maybe all information systems experience this phenomenon.
May 14th, 2008 at 10:03 am
The internet is (self) aware and cannot stop thinking about sex
May 14th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Thank you. You have helped someone more than you could know.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
A “new breed”? Boy, have you not been paying attention. I’ve been getting that kind of spam for many years now. It’s a simple attempt to bypass the human filters by being non-specifically obsequious. It’s based upon the idea that many bloggers will think, “Hey, great, what a nice compliment!” and not bother to see the link to the spam site. It is so common that some times, I almost delete actual compliments from visitors to my blog because they look just like the spam.
And, by the way, I think your site is fantastic! Great design. I will definately be visiting again. And also by the way, here is a completely unrelated link to an innocuous site that I just happened to pull out of my ass.
May 20th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I can’t stand garbage traffic. However, those CAPTCHA boxes some sites use really irk me – especially when it costs me time to decode the silly things (two or three attempts on some sites) and the site still lets spammers through. The best pages are the ones where you submit data but then lose all your work because you incorrectly or forgot to enter some stupid copy-paste code at the bottom of the screen.
I use an invisible GOTCHA that I designed on a forum site I run. It’s one of those phpBB forums that spambots love to pieces, as there’s no end of internet bots designed to set up fake accounts and post offensive things.
The entire trick uses a small piece of CSS coding on the registration page, and has been so effective that I’ve turned off all of the more visible tricks. One of the registration fields is made invisible (using a display:none rule in the external style sheet) so that real users cannot see it. Spambots, however, don’t look at the page styles – they want to get in, make the account, post a few times, then disappear. To them, the field is visible. (And not only is it visible to them, the input boxes were renamed so that the spamcatcher box has an irresistible name – username or email or something that’s always a required field name. I’ve been spam-free so long I’ve forgotten what I used!)
Needless to say, any data entered into the normally invisible box causes the registration to fail. To date, exactly 0 auto-registered accounts have slipped past, meaning there have been exactly 0 spam postings since it was put into effect! And the best part (for me, at least) is that there are no CAPTCHAs or similar hoops that real people have to jump through to prove that they’re really people – it’s the spammers that are being duped to reveal their illegitimacy. I love having an innocent-until-proven-guilty system on my site, as I feel it shows proper respect to our members.
If you’ve got access to the actual forum HTML code, the GOTCHA idea is pretty simple to put in place – however, the way blog bots operate may be different enough than forum bots to make the approach less effective. Still, it may help reduce unwanted traffic!
Good luck fighting the good fight!
~Dave