Looks and smells like comment spam

Lately we’ve been getting a few of these types of comments, which seem to slip through the cracks, even though we’re using one of the best anti-spam applications there is:

Name: William Smith | Email: Michael@yahoo.com | URI: http://www.eweek.com/ | IP: 210.100.138.124 Reading your content just made my day. Keep the good work. Green is feature of Small Cosmos: http://abcnews.go.com/ , Rape Boy is very good Grass when Soldier Double Chair Loose , Roll Increase Forecast - that is all that Mistery is capable of when TV is Game it will Do Circle

It looks like comment spam and smells like comment spam. But the websites referenced are not only legit but very popular as well. So, what is it? Perhaps a general attempt to pollute centralised anti spam blacklists?

A little poking around revealed that the spammers had finally caught up with us with exactly that goal in mind. Dougal Cambell talked about this in his article “Poisoning of the well” some nine months ago. In essence the intent is to trick websites into classifying seemingly “normal” comments as “spam” and thus eventually make their spam filters ineffective by posting garbage similar to this:

Name: Nicholas Johnson | Email: nathan@msn.com | URI: http://www.dallasnews.com/ | IP: 210.100.138.124 A very friendly site. have a nice day! right slot will do plane without any questions: http://www.fark.com/ , Create Table is very good Circle astonishing, tremendous, central nothing comparative to standard , Good, Industrious, Lazy nothing comparative to Standard big boy is always collective opponents

Name: James Freeman | Email: David@msn.com | URI: http://www.drudgereport.com/ | IP: 24.97.174.130 Very nice. I hope you’ll update very soon. to Loose TV you should be very Lazy: http://www.un.org/News/ , Good is feature of Small Circle Superb Table is always Small Game , Coolblooded, Industrious, Collective nothing comparative to Memorizing Astonishing is feature of Full Cards

Name: Carlos Allison | Email: Jason@msn.com | URI: http://www.usatoday.com/news/front.htm | IP: 195.175.37.71 You have some really cool stuff at your site. I’m sure gonna come back here. Cosmos can Steal Gnome: http://www.usatoday.com/ , Full Opponents is always Central Stake Roll Destroy Give - that is all that Slot is capable of , Superb is feature of Full Player Industriousis feature of Superb TV

Because we moderate all comments manually, identifying the garbage is easy just by reading the comment. However, it still takes up time. That amount of time is pretty small with the relatively low volume of comments we get. But what if that were to increase tenfold? A hundredfold? I’m sure we would have to revert to some automated way of approving only the “legit” comments. But how would that work? By checking IP addresses? By comparing the commenters name against their email address? By looking for meaningless phrases like “a very friendly site”, “very nice” and “you have some really cool stuff at your site”. None of those methods would work accurately.

So, what’s the solution then? I don’t know. Yet.

Posted in Blogs, Marketing, Web by Ivan