Stumble it!A suggestion for comment spammers
posted in General by themaiden |Your efforts are wasted.
Unfortunately, your efforts waste my time too. Spam comes through at a rate of hundreds to one over real comments. This is annoying.
I won’t be printing your nonsense strings of words. Nor will I print lists of hyperlinks. I don’t recall ever seeing such things on anyone else’s blog either. I’m sure that other bloggers delete this junk on sight, as do I, if, that is, some software like Askimet doesn’t do the deleting first. I’m left wondering exactly what the point is then? How effective is this obviously automated shotgun approach, if everything gets deleted? Everything? Yes. Everything. Just below I quote a bit of spam I received last night. A quick search for it reveal how many returns? Zero. Remove the name at the end, Mikael, and you get one return… pointing to a mildly snarky post about writing comment spam. In other words, the approach currently being taken by comment spammers is a miserable failure.
Now, I have to admit that I’ve seen some valiant efforts to remodel the spam format. This…
Bonjour! What a super websight! Very refreshing to peruse from where we live in Paris (France). I eat frogs and drink wine. Woold like more informatons on this. Best regards! Mikael.
… is certainly far better than this…
Chunky fat. Mustache housewife chunky. Tench breastfed nuclear-powered cornea poop baby remarkable canoeing …
… which is much better than a string of fifty hyperlinks coming from tramdol, Britny Spears, or Asia Carrera (if only I were so fortunate). Still, none of it ever hits the page.
My suggestion? Rethink the problem.
Spam is advertising, essentially. Don’t alienate the people from who you want free advertising. That’s idiotic. Instead, wiggle your way into our hearts. Make us love you. How? Well, read our damned posts, and, of course, provide something in return. Spamvertising expenses would go up, of course. Automation would be out. People would need to be paid to surf and post coherent, on topic, comments, but if done right everyone is happy.
A human spammer– paid, say, six dollars an hour– could read and comment on four to ten posts per hour. Taking the lower number, this would mean a cost of about $1.50 US per piece of comment spam. I’m sure this is vastely more expensive than current comment spam prices, but this more expensive spam might actually be seen by the general public.
I still haven’t explained why a blogger would approve the spam. After all, if the spamvertising is to work, the advertising– the hyperlink to some commercial site– has to appear in the comment, and a webmaster would spot it with little trouble. So why would a webmaster let it slide? The answer is in the implementation. If the spammer does in fact read posts and post on topic comments, that spammer is in a position to provide the blogger a valuable service. Namely, a spammer who spends day after day reading page after page will soon become intimately familiar with the blogoverse and be in a position to link and crosslink similar posts around the web. Done tactfully, I suspect that most bloggers would learn to appreciate this crosslinking enough to forgive the advertising. I would.
Should, for example, someone post…
I saw a similar article at www.somewebsite.com and contradictory ones at www.someotherwebsite.com and at www.somethirdwebsite.com.
Peggy from www.shoestore.com
I’d let it slide, provided that the links were valid and that I was reasonably sure that ‘Peggy’ was similarly crosslinking my posts. ‘Peggy’ would be doing something I just don’t have time to do, and she’d be getting in a plug for her advertiser– a plug that I’d never post otherwise. Everyone wins.
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