I woke up to ten or so first-time comments* in the moderation queue at Speed Force this morning. As I started reading them I was briefly confused: they were well-written, specific comments about comic books….that had nothing to do with the posts they were attached to. Complaining about Bendis’ writing on an interview with Paul Ryan (the artist, not the politician). Gushing about an Ultra-Humanite figure on a review of a Flash comic. Tips on finding exclusive Aquaman figures on a Flash TV episode review.
Then I felt strangely nostalgic, because I hadn’t seen this sort of spam in a long time.
As near as I can tell, the spammer finds a related site, scrapes comments from it, and pastes them into the target site. To what end I’m not sure, because the comments all linked to Facebook profiles. Most comment spam seems to be about link generation to prop up a spamvertised site in search rankings. But sure enough, when I searched for phrases from the spammy comments, I found the originals on a Daredevil fan blog, an action figure site, an artist’s blog, and so on.
I’ve got to give the spammer a little credit for two things:
- Finding actual comics-related blogs to scrape comments from.
- Inserting typos to make it harder to match. Though Google’s pretty good at fixing those.
In the end, though…
plonk!
*I have WordPress set up so that first-time commenters always go through moderation, while returning commenters are allowed through unless they trips a filter.
I caught an even sneakier one last week: Someone had copied a comment from a Variety article on the Flash Season Two Premiere back in October, about the time paradoxes related to the Reverse Flash’s fate as of the end of Season One, and pasted it onto an article featuring the trailer for the character’s Season Two return in January.
Nice try, but something about it was just off enough for me to go looking. Maybe it was that they were talking about Episode 1 (“The Man Who Saved Central City”) on a post about Episode 11 (“The Reverse Flash Returns”). Or maybe it was that they were named “Zip Code Info.”
Amusingly, when I went back to check the link today, I found that “Zip Code Info” had also posted on the old Variety article…about last week’s episode 10 (“Potential Energy”). O_o