BLOG SPAM REDUX
Over the last couple of days, I’ve gotten a lot of rather ungrammatical advertisements posted in my comments sections. Steven Taylor has had the same problem at PoliBlog.
The really puzzling part of this phenomenon is that the comments are posted on very old posts–some months old–that are therefore unlikely to be read by many people. That makes it moderately harder for me to delete them, certainly, but it is still a strange way to go about the enterprise.
Sounds like the blog software folks need to either require registration before posting, or add something to the post dialog to verify the poster is a literate human… yeah, the spammers are getting really desperate.
Steven, if you still have the MT confirmation email, I would personally out the spammer. Post his IP addy and email address and if it’s hawking something illegal, complain to the dude’s Web hosting company. (I don’t see complaining to the person’s ISP unless they’ve written something truly harassing.) If anything, by posting the IP address, it’ll be google-able so others can see his trail.
I’ve been doing that for my spammers. I figure that soon enough they’ll learn not to visit my site.
Also, I’m not convinced it’s a bot doing the work, especially since the user agents I’ve seen associated with the spam has so far been just normal browser strings. I haven’t seen evidence to convince me that it’s occurring on a wide automated basis.
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