This morning I had a comment from someone/something on a post that was more than two years old. Which was suspicious on its face. Here was the comment:
Hi there, I do believe your website could possibly be having web browser compatibility issues.
When I look at your site in Safari, it looks fine however, when opening in IE, it’s got some overlapping issues. I merely wanted to provide you with a quick heads up! Apart from that, excellent site!
That’s the first one I’ve gotten that seemed to be trying to call a problem to my attention, in a new ploy to suggest that an actual person was sincerely reacting to my blog.
But the dead giveaway was the mention of Internet Explorer. I mean, what actual human still uses IE?
OK, I’m kidding. I’m sure many of my readers do so, and that’s fine (personally, I alternate between Chrome and Firefox, with an occasional foray into Safari). No, the ultimate giveaway was the “excellent site!” bit. Nobody writes in to say that, except spammers. Not to my blog, anyway. And if they did, they would tell me what it is they like about it, which a machine, so far, cannot do convincingly.
Here’s what I’m wondering about — does anybody know what the spammers hope to gain from such messages? I don’t get it. I followed the provided link, and I can’t see how anyone on the planet could benefit from my having done so. Unless there’s something going on that I don’t see.
I suppose, after all these years of blogging and many more years online, I should understand these things better. But I just ain’t that hep.
Can anyone explain this?
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Wow. I just went in and checked, and I’ve received 89 spam comments already this morning. I just don’t see them, because WordPress grabs them and throws them into the “spam” folder before I do…
I hope somebody has an answer because I’d love to know the motivation behind this sort of gibberish.
And MOST of those “comments” were of a sort that I DO understand, since they included links to sites that were trying to sell me something — although sometimes in a language I don’t understand.
But it’s THIS type of very common spam that I don’t get: “Excellent read, I just passed this onto a colleague who was doing some research on that. And he actually bought me lunch since I found it for him smile So let me rephrase that: Thank you for lunch!”
Or: “You certainly know your own stuff… keep the good succeed!”
Or: “Hello.This post was extremely interesting, especially since I was investigating for thoughts on this topic last Monday.”
That’s the kind I don’t get.
Make sure you are keeping your virus protection/firewall/malware protection up to date, especially if you are following strange links in spam. You’ll wind up like the SCDOR.
Good point. Those old reporter instincts — just go ahead and barge in to see what’s going on — may not serve me well in this instance.
It used to be that google’s search rankings counted the number of links from “good” sites to a particular site, and used that number to help figure out how important a site is. So a link to cheapfakewatches.ru from bradwarthen.com made cheapfakewatches.ru show up higher in a search for “rolex,” but a link from fakecheapwatches.ru to cheapfakewatches.ru wouldn’t have the same effect. In the past year, Google has learned to distinguish spam comments from other comments (because they all link to the same shill web sites) so it actually hurts the search ranking to link in a post like that.
Here’s an interesting story about a comment spam related law suit:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/07/chutzpam.php
Did I miss where you all already talked about the “warning this site may be compromised” on the Google search page for months:
https://www.google.com/webhp?source=search_app#hl=en&sugexp=les%3B&gs_nf=3&tok=AtX_XepwKR03mMcpuZrzrw&pq=bradwarthen.com&cp=7&gs_id=u&xhr=t&q=bradwarthen.com&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=bradwar&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=95d47d9a6668ab67&bpcl=37189454&biw=1366&bih=643
They’re hoping you will respond, showing that your site and email address are active
I get those as well. Like WordPress, Blogger catches most of them and they go into the spam comments subfolder.
It’s just phishing. Don’t reply, don’t click, or acknowledge them in any way. They are looking for information or worse.
Beware the internet young Jedi, and heed the words of Obi-Wan: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
Uh-oh (referring to obiewankenobie’s) link.
I don’t know what’s up with that.
But in the meantime, I’m going to remove the links from this post…
Burl & Bryan Caskey are correct.
The reasons for spam are varied, numerous, and overwhelmingly without a redeeming social value. The worst kind in my estimation is malware know as ‘keyloggers’.
Keylogging for national security, rarely approved law enforcement, and by Russian, etc. crime syndicate purposes has been done from 500 yards away without malware on any physical connection to our computers.
While the most sinister may be carefully designed to appear innocent, the least sinister are pathetic attempts to generate web traffic (hits) merely to boost future advertising revenue.