26 February 2008 7 Comments

What is SPAM?

From the wikipedia, Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing.

It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target. Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

SPAM at Inspirit:

I get more than a 100 spam comments in a day, that are generally caught up by the Akismet plugin for WordPress, that I have been using ever since I started Inspirit.  Whatever comment spam managed to trick the plugin and got published till now was easily detected and marked spam, manually. This is because spam comments are generally meaningless, unrelated to the content of your blog or website and contain a hell of links. If that not be the case, the website URL and/or the email address filled by the spam bot (or the manual spammer, whatever!) is stupid enough to get them caught. If you see an email address such as lxcwyro@owksm.com, you can be certain that it is spam.

Here’s a preview of some kind of spam I get everyday:

• Large number of links
• Weird, grammatically screwed up and totally irrelevant content of the comment
• Mention of large number of illegal drugs
• Weird Name of the Commentator in both the comments
• Different Email addresses but same website

… are some of the many indications that any particular comment on your blog is actually a spam comment.

SPAM getting smarter than it ever was:

But, what I faced today was entirely different from what I was already known to. Prior to this blog entry, I had written a post about Some Radical Changes at Inspirit to which I received a comment that looked so genuine that I even marked it as not-spam from the Akismet panel.

What part of the first comment (by Eric Hundin) looks like spam to you? The comment by Mr.Eric Hundin is written in perfect English and it seems like he is quite familiar with blogs, blogging services and terminology. Even the email and website address posted by the URL looked perfectly genuine! It was in the form: www.somewebsitename.com and mail@somewebsitename.com !

I visit everyone who takes time to comment at Inspirit and if it interests me, drop a comment as well. Well, I visited Eric Hundin too. Here is what I saw:

Remarkable design, remarkable content, all valid and sound! This website also had a neatly arranged blogroll, link to blog’s RSS and everything you’ll look for in something that you call a blog. Then, what makes me tell you that this comment was no more than spam!

Actually, beyond the footer, the site carried a three links. These three links were to some casino site, property deals site and poker places! I felt a sense of insecurity for the first time and reviewed the blogroll again. Then I noticed three more links at the end of the blogroll that said:

    * sell endowment
* Adult and Children Halloween Costumes
* Email Reply Template Software

 Well, this was a hint enough, and I tried a few other genuine looking links from the blogroll! And there it was! All the blogs were similarly remarkable in their design and content. But they were all almost same in structuring and layout. A display image at each of them in the sidebar, a neat and tidy blogroll, these three links at the end of the sidebar and beyond the footer as well. Also, all the links in the sidebars were to the same websites excluding the blog that carried the links. They were just shuffled up or down at each blog.

I returned to Inspirit and marked the comment as spam before blinking once more!
Amazing! I would not have not known about this blog or any other as spam had not I chanced by those links. And after reading the content on the blog, I was in quite a mood to leave a comment as well.

Spam is getting smarter than it ever was! I hope to see anti-spam measures evolving as fast as Spam is going to prevent all the trouble to publishers, advertisers and genuine content makers!

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