Lately I’ve started getting spam for academic essay-writing services on this blog, and for some reason it really bugs me. I mean, more than the usual pills, porn, personals & fake antivirus crap.
Is it just that I’m more accustomed to the other stuff? Possibly, but I think it’s a little deeper than that. I think the reason it bothers me is that, beyond the spammer himself being dishonest, this is encouraging the target to be dishonest as well.
Yesterday I got a strange comment that I thought looked a bit spammy. It was one of those sneaky comments that pretends it’s reporting a problem on your site. The layout looks off in Chrome, or is broken in Firefox, etc. Except, of course, when you look at it in that browser, it’s just fine.
This one claimed that they’d gotten an alert on their firewall when hitting the blog, and could it be related to one of your ads?
Unlikely given how few ads I use, but possible, since I had a third-party poll, some Amazon links, and a banner for Mozilla Plugin Check. Still, the author’s website looked pretty spammy, once I pulled out the extra w, so I put it back in moderation–
Wait, what was that about an extra w?
Well, they’d linked to wwww.[REDACTED].com. Kind of amusing, but I didn’t think anything of it until I had the chance to look for other sites with similar comments…and found that they all pointed to the broken site!
I’m seeing a lot of word salad spam comments this weekend. It’s entertaining to read them in the vocal style of a Cylon hybrid.
I’m trying to remember when the BOFH attitude prevalent on antispam mailing lists didn’t bother me. It’s weird how suddenly reporting spam turns into a bad thing because someone (else) might make money with that knowledge.
