Comment spam tests
I’m checking my comment spam on another blog, and while doing that, I came across a comment that appeared to be legitimate.
The text is as follows:
843840: Hey, does anyone know where I can find a list of gas stations with low prices in my area?
But the number in front of that thing is suspicious, so I decided to google it. And I found lots of comments, with different numbers in front of it.
IP number: 80.190.250.253.
October 23rd, 2005 at 7:03 am
I got one of those too, back on the 18th. Different number at the beginning (108260), same exact text, from IP address 195.169.149.213.
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:45 pm
On our wiki we keep getting stuff with no link like:
“I love your site and find it to be a wonderful resource. Thank you for taking the time to put it all together.”
Mostly these appear on my honeypot pages.
I can’t decide if it is a spammer who doesn’t know what they are doing or he is just trying bug us.
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:50 pm
I think it’s a sobriety test. See which bloggers are astute enough to figure out it’s done by spammers even though it looks legit on many levels. These things just never look legit on ALL levels!
Next step might be to Google those sentences and comment spam the posts they got the comments to stick on. With more and more blogs having premoderation, that makes sense.
October 23rd, 2005 at 7:21 pm
That seems like a very good explanation.
October 24th, 2005 at 12:53 am
I think that all of thouse number are possibly a magic numbers that will be used to lookup backlinks appeared… Due to the fact backlinks list that google shows is limited and not up to date it is not so easy for webspamers to analyze the result of spam. Another possible reason comes to my mind is that this is just a quality test of blog targets list they obtained somewhere. If number will appear - this is a sign that the target is good and also a knowledge where backlinks will appear at the next try…
October 24th, 2005 at 2:23 am
I think the number is a counter number. New number per blog or per comment. Which means searching for it would be totally useless.
October 24th, 2005 at 3:28 am
The numbers could be nothing more than a way to randomize the message against filters. Email spammers used to do that for a while.
October 27th, 2005 at 8:15 am
Manni figured out what the “I love your site…” spammer was doing on our wiki. He was showing his stupidity of course. He is using the same method for spamming guestbooks as he is for spamming wikis.
See the Oct 12 comment here:
http://www.bd4d.com/blog/2005/04/17/getting-away-from-the-computer/
He is sending his link as the webpage field which our wiki totally ignored. Manni has corrected that so now his spam will be blocked.