I love Akismet, the collective blog spam tool that automatically prunes the crap from the comments. I have noticed, though, that the comments are getting more clever. Take this one (since deleted) that went something like:
“I have searched everywhere and found your site. It is amazing!
Typically, generic comments like that are signs of blatant spam that has evolved into some easy-to-mass-produce and attractive-to-blogger mutation in the hope of getting kept. The link that is included in the comment, though, goes to the New Porn — a link to online poker. In addition to being slightly more elaborate, the one above also had a link to sport-scope.info.
I click, because I care … and there is a blog. Clearly a WordPress blog that has a few entries. I click OK to approve the comment without thinking more about it, but then have second thoughts. The blog has only been active this week (strike one) and seems to have some disconnected nonsense as posts (strike two). On a hunch, I copied a random phrase into Google and wind up finding a match in an ebooks site. So this guy seems to be automatically mining content from a site with a great chance of cohesiveness for a short post, in the hope of making the blog look active and otherwise normal. (strike three)
I will be very interested to return to this link in a few months and see if it has either (a) continued to mine short posts from other sites or (b) has been replaced by an online poker site.
1 reply on “An interesting attempt to spam?”
This has a term … “splogging” (spam + blog) and isn’t a new phenomena, although there apparently is some subjective evidence that it is on the rise. It will be interesting to see if Wired’s article on the subject helps or hinders the splogging.
For more info, try this post + commentary on WordPress’s dabbling into splogging from 18 months or so ago. WP founder Matt had a response to the accusations.
The WIred article isn’t available online until Sept. 5, but if I had a guess to make right now, I’d say it would be available here.