To me, it seems the hard way to do things, but I suppose it doesn't require hiring an IT professional or buying software. There has been a rash of comment spam lately, obviously manually generated (copy-pasted?), with comments along the lines of "Nice post" followed sometimes by a URL... anything to get those numbers up, I suppose. This has become common enough in the past week that from now on I'll delete it unremarked.
What an annoying phenomenon! In other news, water is wet.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
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Yep, the deal is that it's incredibly cheap to hire a million indigent Indians to manually input these spams for a fraction of a penny apiece (most of them are Indian, other nationalities can't manage the English well enough), and it works well enough to get customers to pay for their "Google search enhancement service". Just goes to show that the Internet is fundamentally broken, being an academic experiment that was never intended to be anything other than an interconnect between defense contractors and universities, not something that any spammer under the sun could rent a pipe and attach to.
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Geek Penguin
(Who was there when the current Internet was being designed and knows what its design criteria was).
I get the same stuff but the good news is that Blogger catches it. The only reason I notice is that I use comment moderation.
ReplyDeleteWhen we get those there's usually a high spike in visits from the former Soviet Union. Worse, is when they get your address. Recently, we got an e-mail from one of our more staid friends and it turned out to be an add for Viagra and Russian mail-brides!
ReplyDelete"an add for Viagra and Russian mail-brides!" - mandt
ReplyDeleteROFL! Maybe for some (straight) guys, that's a high-selling combination! :-)
Kay, this is Blogger's commenting service on which I receive the manual spam.
ReplyDeleteI think BadTux is right: some painfully low-paid person in India cranks them out for a few cents an hour. It's both saddening and exasperating.
These comments may be why some other blogging systems (e.g. full-blown WordPress) don't allow comments fewer than, say, three words. That would eliminate them, along with any legitimate short-answer comments that may come in.
BTW, BadTux, the ghost of My Mom the English Teacher asks me to remind you that "criteria" is plural (the singular is "criterion"), and hence "criteria" takes the verb "were" instead of "was". Mom never could stop showing off her grammatical prowess, even when she was alive in this world, and I am my mother's son...
ReplyDeleteI tend to agree with Badtux, too. However since it goes straight in the spam folder on my dashboard, I don't much give a damn.
ReplyDeleteKay, the comments I'm talking about emphatically do NOT go into the spam folder. They appear among regular published comments.
ReplyDeleteMaybe your setting to moderate comments has some effect on spam determination as well; I don't know. I turn on moderation only when I'm having a problem... an infestation of wingnuts, or something like that... so most of the time, anything anyone types goes straight up on the site. Regrettably, that includes these tiny spam comments.