Just a heads-up in case it’s not already on the radar: I noticed a dating site spam message that is very well disguised on a recent article: http://toucharcade.com/2009/11/06/karnival-tycoon-style-gameplay-with-freaks-and-sideshows/ …and the same just appeared on several other TA stories. Sounds like TouchArcade is about to be under attack by the same problem (gravatar, wordpress) that this guy was—spammers that make seemingly relevant comments: http://jaybot7.com/blog/warning-fling-com-comment-bots-are-intelligent (But he says they are really smart bots; whereas I wonder if there isn’t a human sweatshop component, or even Mechanical Turk! Cranking out goof “relevant” comments in such quantities sounds like too much for AI, or for a single person.)
There is nothing new there, nothing at all. It's just that some people have started to notice and others are being hit for the first time. These spammers aren't stupid - they know just what they are doing. Hit everyone all at once and they get noticed, word gets round, they get closed down. So they move carefully. They also impact sites that are not WordPress and that do not use Akismet. They rely on a blog owner seeing a gravatar will assume they are a real person. Someone is spamming here? So they sign up, login, find a thread and spam. I've reported it here a couple of times too, and on other sites. In the end, check. That's all. Find out where the links go and act accordingly.
If the comments are intelligent and relevant, is it really spam? What's worse: an intelligent comment made by someone with a link to a dating site they are plugging, or one of the many inane comments made by people who aren't spammers but who are unintelligent? edit: I mean a case where the link is in the name and is unobtrusive. A link within the comment itself would be another story. I don't have a dog in this fight, as I'm not selling anything, but it seems to me that it's not quite so cut and dried.
It's spam if you say it's spam. Here's one tactic: Mary leaves a comment and the website she links to in her name is innocent. She returns and continues to make relevant comments. And at some point her link changes to porn, pills or something equally vile. But because you now like her comments you probably don't notice. This is the link that her name goes to, not a link in a post. 'nofollow' does not work for those that will say to use it. Here's another tactic: Mary does her comment thing but her link goes to somewhere else. You might check it once but that's it. Later on her link gets a redirect to somewhere nasty too. "Hi, nice site!" "Great post" "I have bookmarked your site" and similar unexpected praise is all spam, all junk. captcha does not work so please don't rely on that. Bill Bartman? Huge spammer. http://forum.moldova.org/index.php? showuser=4281 - click nothing there - is just one example. It used to be bots that did this, now it's people. They are paid to comment, they have templates of replies to use. They follow up the sites they used and where their comments are allowed to stay they leave more. Other spammers see this so they too leave more with you. And don't forget that this isn't just about a link to buy pills. It's also about getting malware onto computers. That's a pay industry too. In the end it's your website and we all like comments but if you aren't sure, just remove their links. They rely on you looking once then not looking again but they are playing the long game.
Apparently we call the shots on what is and isn't spam, so I judged your post as spam and sentenced it to 3 months community service.
Its not a one-off thingshe mass-posted on multiple articles here, and that dating site does the same all over the Web lately. Often with the same photo and a variety of different names. That makes it an abuse of the site. Id still forgive it if she were posting helpful tips or something, but the posts are not THAT relevant. Theyre merely on-topic. Which is enough makes this a real step forward in spam
As a colleague of mine said a couple of days ago, the pretty girl avatar/gravatar is the new spam indicator. If we click her name in that comment we can see more of her and her profile goes to Fling which is spam / porn / adult. And the nofollow really does not make a difference, they still get SEO from it.
