Here’s an interesting phenomenon to ponder — and perhaps some of you who understand the Web better than I do can explain why it happens.
One of the few good things about the fact that I now have my blog programmed to hold comments for my approval (I’d rather leave the spigot open, but I’ve been taught over and over that blog hooligans always take advantage of that) is that I can stop all the spam comments before they appear.
These things come in waves. For instance, I’ll get six or seven in a row that all have "hotel" in the fake e-mail address, and ostensibly advertise deals for holidays at hotels in Zurich, London, Hong Kong, etc. The text will more often than not contain a generic-sounding message such as "Great site! I’ll be back," or "Not doing much today; just sitting around." Like I’m interested.
But here’s the thing that puzzles me: These messages keep getting posted on the same old posts, over and over. This one, headlined "Another try," is a real spam magnet — even though, when I went to find a link to it, I had trouble finding it. Google didn’t want to go directly to it, which suggests to me that it hasn’t been accessed much by spammers or anyone else. So how come spam messages keep appearing on it? You’ll note there are a bunch of spam messages on it from before I went to the current policy of approving them before they appear. (I’ll go clean those later.) Is that it? Does the presence of spam attract other spam?
Note that the post is from September 2006, and yet I got a new piece of spam on it today. That’s part of the modus operandi of spammers; I guess glomming onto on long-forgotten posts is a way of flying under the radar.
Here’s another example: "Jim DeMint meeting," from August 2005. This one, old as it is, also received a slice of spam today, and also has a bunch of old spam clinging to its bottom like so many barnacles. Posts right next to it don’t have this problem; the spam goes straight for this one.
Also, once again, Google would not take me straight to this one. But it took me to something interesting: This site, which seems to form a sort of nexus for spam and this particular post. Can anybody tell me what this is, and better yet, how to stop this whole problem from recurring?
Anyway, the whole thing is like something from science-fiction/fantasy. It’s as thought these posts are interdimensional portals of the sort that Heinlein wrote about in this one, or the open ends of wormholes or something. Altogether weird.
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Brad,
Some spammers, especially the biggies in china, asia and former soviet bloc couuntries, use automated robots/spiders to crawl web sites and harvest harvest snapshots of your site activity, including email addresses and post topics. Most likely these guys crawled your site on the post dates mentioned, therefore they continue to spam to those posts. When they crawl your site again, they’ll get another snapshot of your current posts with associated email addresses, and the new spam will be for those dates, etc.
Most blogs don’t publish email addresses.
Links Roundup
Sorry for the delay in getting these out; I’ve had a nasty cold for the past few days. Spam through the years: A timeline Spam the Vote: Ron Paul Spam Surfs into Inboxes WWD Coffee Break – Stickers, Spam, and…
Hi Brad and everyone else
Just to correct. The name of my newspaper is Nyhedsavisen. Our webpage is avisen.dk.
We are one of the most widely read national newspapers in Denmark.
Hope you have a good election day in SC.
Sincerely Sara Schlüter
[email protected]
[email protected]