Comment spam

I’ve received strange spam before but I think this one takes the cake in terms of bizarreness factors and nicheness.

To: Mr. matt.clements We Supply Sodium Fluoride Formulae: NaF Molecular weight: 42UN. No: 83015 H.S. CODE: 2826.1100 Properties: White powder, soluble in water, slightly soluble in alcohol, poisonous goods; can be used as manufacturing of enamel, vermin destroyer, rat poison; as insecticide, preservatives for wood and food, antiseptic in alcohol distillation. Quality Standard Index NameMass Percent NaF Content≧98.0% Moisture≦0.5％ S04≦0.1% Water Insolubles≦0.7% PH≦0.1％ Sodium Carbonates≦0.5% Si02≦0.5% Packaging and transportation: Goods will be packed into two layers polyethylene knitting bags with its single net weight to be 25 kgs. per bag. Pay attention to the handling of the package bag for preventing the damages. Shenzhen Quantum Trade Co., Ltd. Rm. 437, Zhenhua Mansion, No. 25, Huafa North Rd., Futian Zone 518031, Shenzhen, PR China Tel: 86-755-83284339/83344724 Fax: 86-755-83284435 Mobile: 86-13500068242 e-mail

My guess is that they got my email address from the IEEE. Stupid harvesters!

For some reason I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam recently touting the wonders of backgammon. Now I’m all for advertising lesser games of chance but the one thing I do mind is that their spelling of backgammon is all over the map. I’ve seen backgamon, backgammonn, backgammon – it’s ridiculous. I wonder if discussing backgammon on this post if I’ll receive even more comment spam.

I knew that subscribing to my own Wiki’s RSS feed would come in handy. I subscribe to the Recent Changes page on the Wiki just in case something like what I’m about to describe happens.

Some spammer created a page called RecentVisitors on my Wiki. That page (which is now deleted) is created on installations of PHPWiki (which I used to use; I’ve since switched to MediaWiki). It’s meant to be like a guestbook however the nature of the Wiki leaves it very open to abuse.

So this spammer created this page. He then added “Jacob from [some spammer’s site]” to the page. The page isn’t linked to or from any other page; I would have had to have known that it existed to find it. However since I subscribe to the RSS feed, it tells me every single change to the Wiki. I knew within the hour what had occurred and quickly deleted the page.

The whole point of these spams (spem?) is to increase the page rank of the linked site. Since more and more search engines are indexing blogs, comment spam is not going to go away. Though this is the first encounter I’ve had with Wiki spam, I’m sure it won’t be the last. If it becomes more of a problem then I’m going to have to investigate ways to lock that down. As much as I like Wiki’s (and it’s a lot), I can’t afford to have my own Wiki turn into a cesspool of spam links.

Last week I was bombarded with comment spam in this space. This isn’t the first time this has happened (as evidenced by these previous posts) but this time it was pretty severe – over 360 comments were in the moderation queue. Fortunately I have enough protective elements on this blog that none of them made it onto the site itself but I still had to delete 360 comments and mark them as spam so that my spam filters are smarter in the future. It didn’t take that long but it was kind of annoying. I suppose it could be worse – deleting live comments or having several times the number of comments to delete. I guess that’s one of the good things about being the 3,121,966th blog by traffic according to Alexa – I’m flying under most spammers’ radar.

I haven’t had much comment spam recently mainly due to the robust safeguards I’ve installed on this server. This morning though there were a few and they were interesting in their content. All linked to gambling sites but to try and get through the filters they use choice language. Here are some of the award winners:

• He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
• Modern science disclaims any intention of understanding the hidden nature of things; its philosophy condemns any such endeavour as vague, misleading and altogether unscientific….But I refuse to heed this warning. I agree that the process of understanding leads beyond – indeed far beyond – what a strict empiricism regards as the domain of legitimate knowledge; but I reject such an empiricism. If consistently applied, it would discredit any knowledge whatever and it can be upheld only by allowing it to remain inconsistent. It is permitted this inconsistency because its ruthless mutilation of human experience lends it such a high reputation for scientific severity, that its prestige overrides the defensiveness of its own foundations. Our acknowledgement of understanding as a valid form of knowing will go a long way towards liberating our minds from this violent and inefficient despotism.
• One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.
• False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.
• From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed towards that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.

I guess that the comment spam scripts have access to Bartlett’s Famous Quotations.

I’ve talked about comment spam before and about once a week I get a bunch of comments that need moderating. It’s a trivial task and so far I haven’t had any false positives or false negatives. The moderation capabilities of Wordpress are truly great. I have to laugh at this comment spam though:

I have always looked for a possibility to find information as quick as I can. Now there is the internet. And I really appreciate people like you who take their chance in such an excellent way to give an impression on certain topics. Thanks for having me here.

[Link to some random casino site]

It makes me feel good that the spammers find me such a great resource “on certain topics”.

Last night I had my first experience with comment spam in this space. I checked my mail around 11 o’clock and found that I had 34 new comments here. Now at first I was surprised because the most comments I think I’ve ever received on any post was 10 and I didn’t think that what I wrote yesterday was that interesting. I then looked at what the comments were and they were all spam. Advertising online casinos or business grants or government grants. Fortunately I’m using Wordpress so all but two of the comments were waiting for my moderation and didn’t appear on the site. I quickly bulk deleted the comments and updated my moderation expression list to catch the two stragglers next time.

I think I made the right choice with Wordpress. As Matt details in this post, the comment features alone make it worthwhile. I’m looking forward to the 1.3 release because it looks to push the envelope even further and reduce the presence of comment spam on my site to a negligible amount (hopefully). I’ve seen MovableType sites complain endlessly about the presence of these spam comments, even if they have MT Blacklist installed. It’s really too bad that people find it worthwhile to create scripts that spam like this. I guess for some, money rules all.