Overly-pleasant spam
Here’s an unanticipated effect of spam.
Spam showing up in blog comments increasingly tries to pass itself off as a genuine comment. So, I’ve been getting spams that say how interesting my blog is and how much they care about what I have to say. How touching!
Other comment spam disguises itself in the form of some bromide so generic that it can apply to any blog article and so bland that no one will object to it. For example, “Pamela Woodlake” recently spammed an entry on Andrew Odlyzko’s comparison of broadband and cell phone adoption rates with the heartwarming comment that “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” The URL she gave as hers, however, is for some weight-loss hokum.
Frankly, I’d rather be spammed by someone touting penile enhancements than drown in innocuous platitudes.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
David Weinberger on Social Spam
David Weinberger writes about the increasingly prevalent practice of leaving ‘social spam’ in blog comments. He notes, unhappily, that the often the comments are bland and inexact encouragement to the blog author, suitable for nearly any context: “Fran…
David Weinberger on Social Spam
David Weinberger writes about the increasingly prevalent practice of leaving ‘social spam’ in blog comments. He notes, unhappily, that the comments are often bland and inexact encouragement to the blog author, suitable for nearly any context: “Frankly,…
Information just wants to be free. So true. (Some platispam for you, because you asked for it.)
The big advantage of this to the spammer is that it probably gives their site a great Google rank.
It also probably explains why I saw some “spam” web pages featured in the Daypop top 40 recently, a real coup for the spammer, I’d think.
The real problem is our blacklist continue to grow at breakneck speed, yet remain utterly ineffective. A more vindictive response is the only effective solution.
The real problem is our blacklist continue to grow at breakneck speed, yet remain utterly ineffective. A more vindictive response is the only effective solution.
re: enhancements–don’t u trust ’em.
LOL. “Pamela Woodlake” just commented on a year-old entry on my site today, but forgot to include a URL. So all that’s left is yahoo email address, and a strange, but not-inappropriate, comment.
Pammy also just left another aphorism as a comment on a different blog entry of mine:
“Ain’t no disgrace to be poor – but might as well be.”
How true. And yet how false.
All hail Jay Allen! I rely on his MT blacklist plugin. What a nice piece of work!
Or, as Ms. Wood Lake [breaking up her name so she wouldn’t get Google/Daypop credit] just said about a different blog entry, “Study without thinking, and you are blind; think without studying, and you are in danger.”
And then she screwed up the url she was spamming: There’s a big fat space in the middle of it.
If you change the comments template to display the comment’s associated URL as text — instead of as a hyperlink with their Name — then you take away a large chunk of the Google benefit associated with blog spam.
pamela just reached me…
wasnt too impressed; my blog has been pretty clean so far.
oh well! all part ofthe fun, i guess.
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I’ve been watching some sites that were linked from weblogs.
Now google does not display the weblogs links when you seach for backward links.
It seems that these links don’t count anymore.
Contact and Feed Flow
Christopher Allen tackles the issue of social network saturation and what to do when you have more than 150 connections on a social networking service. I previously distinguished between active and latent ties and their impact on social capital….