Home » Spambots: the invasion of the comment snatchers

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Spambots: the invasion of the comment snatchers — 27 Comments

  1. BTW, one thing that can help is to get that tone-thing, which i gather does actually work.

    You can put it on your answering machine, too, and get rid of those sorts of calls if nothing else (even without purchasing anything like a call blocker)

    I gather what they do is preface any connection with a tone sequence — the same one that happens if you dial a dead number (“Doo-Daahh-Doo! The number you have reached is not in service…”). Autodialers pick up on that Doo-Daahh-Doo! and assume it’s a bad number and skip to the next… I believe they also usually discard the number from their lists.

    Hence, if you record that sound and play it back at the beginning of your answering machine message, it throws away most spam calls you don’t pick up yourself, as they immediately hang up on you.

    I think the blockers you can purchase for direct connect to the phone just do the same thing with all calls, just as they sense you pick up. That’s a guess, though, i haven’t looked into them.

    At some point enough will be wise to this that the spammers will alter their techniques, but for now, I gather they work.

  2. Y’all suck. To see how much better a blog can be, come over to http:\\www.blome.com\yallsuck.php and bask in my glory. You can leave stuff like comments, too.

    BWAAAAAhahahahahahahahahahahaAAA!!!!
    (8-D
    My nefarious plan is afoot!

  3. Bookworm: I’ve been getting those for as long as I’ve had a blog. They tend to come late at night and/or on weekends, and they arrive in bunches. Some sort of robotic program seems to release them, so my guess is that, technically speaking, they are also a form of spambot.

  4. What I’ve been getting is something a little different. In my statcounter, I’ll click on the “came from” link, and I’ll discover that I got three or four hits from a blog I’ve never heard of. I go to that blog and discover that it’s a fake blog advertising something. Apparently the fake blogs link to real blogs to create interest through the stat counters. Sneaky but, in a perverse way, impressive.

  5. Spambot, huh? Nice to know the name for it. I had my first experience with one a couple of weeks ago and since I wasn’t familiar with the phenomenon, it left me puzzled. There’s a blog I check daily …I like what he links to and his analysis of issues but it seems he almost never gets comments. His comments section had not been user friendly but then he figured out how to make it more accessible and happily announced so on his blog. I went to comments to check out the new and improved technique and saw he already had a comment complementing him on his “stuff” and inviting him and others of like mind to check out the commenter’s blog “How nice”, I thought, “he has a fan!” And so I linked and, much to my surprise, found myself on a porn site. I felt insulted for the sake of blogger #1…seemed like a creepy invasion of somebody’s personal space. So, now I know what it’s called….I’m even less lingo savy than you claim to be, neo.

  6. I started getting some spambots early on when posting. I had just established my blog and then two days later they started coming. I guess it happens more when you have longer comment threads.

  7. Have you tried blocking non-caller ID calls? That usually takes care of most of these nuisance calls.

    Just think of it as weed block for you phone!

  8. – and speaking of spam and non-related things, Neo what are your thoughts on gun ownership, self defense, gun control? This message comes from my spambot self that emerges on occasions while I sleep

  9. I’ve been lucky with Blogger not to have targeted yet for comment spam. I have gotten the recorded phone calls as you describe on my answering machine. I wonder if those folks think they’re getting around the National and State “do not call” lists I’m on. They’re not.

    Recently I have been getting robot phone calls that take a moment to activate [dead giveaway] and then a scratchy voice says, “please hold for an important call”. Yeah right….I’m gonna’ hold for an advertisement. Bozos.

  10. If you look at the source code for the wedding-spam, you’ll see a REL=”nofollow” placed inside the link. That’s how Blogger is trying to stop spam. The big search engines (Yahoo, Google, MSN, others) will see the “nofollow” and not follow the link, and not give the destination extra PageRank.

    But this doesn’t stop all spammers, since some prefer brute-force, grab-the-eyes spam instead of trying to influence search engine results. And some spammers are just too dumb to realize they’re shooting blanks. So, the problem continues.

  11. I dunno–I think I should just leave those ones up for the ambience, especially the UK Wedding Photography one. You never know when that could come in handy, especially in New England.

  12. Hmmm–was that last comment a real spambot, or just a joke? I was hoping I’d get a real one on this thread–

  13. You….you….you mean, …. those comments in my blog are not REAL?!

    Thanks, I’m going to kill myself now.

  14. It’s the page ranking they are after, not the click. Every link adds to their total and moves the ranking up in google search.

    I agree, I wish blogger would have human posting tools, and allow deleting of one comment at a time. Once the bot finds you, you are in trouble. The only way I found to make them go away is disable comments for aperiod of time — not a good method, but works.

  15. First it was unsolicited junk mail.
    Later, unsolicited telemarketing. Now we get spam with the recent variant called “blogspam”. Where will it end?
    Hey, how about a micro-chip embedded directly into our brainstems. This will provide 24/7 access. Hmmm… Just thinking.

  16. Movable Type is implementing some anti-spam capabilities. Maybe you’ll wanna bug Blogger here to implement some too.

    Sure you don’t wanna keep the ceiling fan spam around, just for sentimentality’s sake?? 🙂

  17. neo-
    did you see that google was placing ads which promoted a terror monger on rogerl simons site? creepy.

  18. It’s not so much that they “work” as much as they improve the google/yahoo ranking for the particular search, whether it’s porn, or gardening supplies, or books, or DVDs…

    So the more of their links they have out there, the higher their rankings will be in google, even if few people actually click on them.

  19. dave s–I agree. But Blogger, the host of this and so many other blogs, hasn’t instituted that sort of system yet. I know I shouldn’t complain, since Blogger is free, but it would definitely be helpful if they would do so. Perhaps if all of us Blogger blogs spoke out as one–

  20. some of the blogs I have been to have something you have to do (put the letter ‘f’ into a box, eg) to leave your comment. this seems to slow down the bots.

  21. I’m glad to see, Alex, that even spambots have a conscience. It refers my faith in human—-or rather, spambot—nature.

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