I’m still working on another project, so I haven’t had much time to keep up on approving posts. And then while that’s going on, comment spam is going through the roof. It’s more than doubled since I started that project.
Is it just here, or is this going on all over the place?
Pretty soon I’ll have to install some anti-spam software here. Handling it manually just isn’t an option anymore, even though I’ve got pretty extensive bad word filters.
One of my sites showed a spike in accesses, and I investigated. Turned out to be this one:
69.57.190.188
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt)
Start [17/Nov/2006:05:08:13 -0700]
Finish [17/Nov/2006:05:15:02 -0700]
2719 requests
It loads css files but no image files. It gets lost on forums and wikis.
Beware!
I saw two other IP numbers with the same (fake) user agent, but they only loaded a few pages each:
24.54.247.123, 85.11.188.85
I was just stumped when moderating a forum I own. I got the same post that was posted here, except the post on my forum didn’t have the text pasted in several times:
And I’ve been getting several of them lately. I’ve found the best way to deal with them is to search for specific sentences in the posts. If they can be found on several forums, the posts are fake - they’re not entered by users, but by bots.
Question is, what’s the point? A test run to see what forums the posts stick to?
I’ve been getting a certain amount of comments to one of my most spammed posts, and one other. They look like off topic questions without any links whatsoever. But they bear the marks of a Russian spamming crew. The e-mail address is their signature.
Can anyone shed light on their motive?
I suppose it could be a test. It could be comment spam poison. But is it something less obvious? Like trying to get a few approved comments, in order to sail through the approval later on?
Someone who’s unfamiliar with the seedy world of spam and SEO recently told me a domain shark had offered to sell a domain he’d expressed an interest in - for $ 50000. That’s fifty thousand dollars!
This is a domain shark that’s been dragged into Wipo arbitration multiple times. Outfits like theirs sometimes win cases involving general dictionary terms, but generally loses when the complainant has a legitimate interest in the domain, when that domain is not so general as to be a plain dictionary term.
I suggested to the person who asked me about this, that they were trying to shake him down. That he should shake them down instead. Exactly what company will respond to what is unknown. Might be an idea to collect information on how various domain sharks have responded to various approaches? A wiki, maybe?
In other news, I’m still working on that project I mentioned before. Which means no time for investigations.