Ingenious comment spam booster
For readers unfamiliar with content management systems like Movable Type (which this site uses), one annoying trend is comment spam, where an automated system will place comments on various articles, linking back to a target site — often one that sells cigarettes, for whatever reason.
The original goal for comment spam was apparently to boost Google page rankings for ne’er-do-well sites by increasing their number of “incoming links.” Movable Type and Google are now smart enough to keep this from happening, but the spam comments persist. MT-Blacklist, a plug-in, does a good job helping sort out the valid comments from the crap, but some of the older articles on the site which pre-date MT-Blacklist still have spam comments.
Which brings us to today. Every time someone adds a comment to the site, I get a copy of it in my email. This morning I got a strange one:
Q: if two players are presented with a diamond flush(Ace, Queen, 10, 7, and 3) in the five community cards and player A has in the hole (ace of hearts and queen of clubs), and Player B has in the hole (jack of diamonds,and 9 of spade). who is the winner?,and please explain why player A or B is the winner.thankyou
I get a lot of off-topic questions, but this one seemed perversely far afield. (Even though I knew the answer: Player B, right?) Only when I pulled up the entry did I realize that the comment directly above it was a leftover spam ad for “seven card stud x play poker online x free texas holdem…” So the new “question” was really comment spam designed to boost exposure to the first comment spam.
It was meta-spam.
On one hand, I was sort of impressed. The spamming system either kept track of everywhere it placed its first spam and went back for a follow-up (months later, it seems), or searched the web for copies of the first spam and tacked on the second.
Here’s to you, Mr. Spammer, for a hard day’s coding. Now go to hell.
Articles
August 9th, 2004 at 7:50 pm
Everyone who hasn’t seen the Daily Show piece on this SPAMMER should do so now. http://www.lynch.st/C1212604180/E1042352658/
August 9th, 2004 at 10:25 pm
How about a nice game of solitaire?
August 12th, 2004 at 1:02 am
Well its great to know that the Spam system (casino) knows what there talking about.
The only thing that remotely frustrates me are pop ups. I was told that every pop-up saves to your Hard Drive.
August 18th, 2004 at 8:47 pm
I happened to notice a lot of strangely literate subject lines in my junk mailbox, so I googled a couple of them and discovered that they were all snipped from “The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov. The emails themselves just contained generic porn links. The logic of spamming is mysterious and subtle.
I like your site and your IMDB column very much.
August 3rd, 2005 at 1:07 am
I also received a mysterious mail with a Master and Margarita quote (“At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch’s Ponds…”). From the address – a Taiwan provider – I guessed it was spam, although I am not sure: there are no links in this mail, so I would have to reply to get in contact. The mail was further “enhanced” by the subject line “Jochen, guess who?” – clever, clever!
September 3rd, 2005 at 4:04 pm
I too have received several spams with different randomly selected quotes from The Master & Margarita. Since it’s a Russian book, could be a local selection by a Russian spammer? It happens that this is one of my very favorite books, so I was momentarily intrigued, but I guess the messages are nothing more than the usual trash. I had even written an Amazon guide on selecting an English translation for the book:
So you’d like to… Read “The Master and Margarita”