tech.thingoid

This blog is possibly the quietest corner of the web. So when a comment arrives, it is usually cause for much celebration.

Actually, that’s not true. It’s usually cause for me to delete another round of comment spam. Usually it’s pretty easy to spot: obscure comments, mangled language, generic congratulations, and yet another remark to the effect that my site is very cognitive…

“Small problem…”

So how concerned was I when I got this comment from ‘Green_Monkey23′?

Sorry for your time…. Why i can’t see images on this resource? My Browser is: Opera. Thank you.

Mildly. For about the half a second it took to get my brain into gear…

Curious

At the time of writing, this blog is published using the plain vanilla WordPress theme with no modifications—or certainly none that would prevent images from loading.

Suspicious

The comment was posted on quite an old entry (three years old, give-or-take a month), which is a strong indicator of comment spam.

Funny

And looking at that entry there are no images in it anyway. And no reference to images in the text. That was funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, more amused-grunt funny.

URI?

So, I flipped over to the moderation queue in the WordPress admin pages and noticed that not only had Green_Monkey23 given me an email address (green_monkey@paymailpro.org, for what it’s worth), he or she (or I should say, it) had also included the URI for a web address. Why would someone do that if they were making a simple enquiry like this?

Incidentally, the address no longer exists. Apparently The file may have been deleted for abuses, among other possible reasons for its disappearance. Oo-err.

Penny meets floor

OK, the penny had dropped well before now. Yep, I’ve been comment spammed—again.

Confirmation

A little poking around at Google:

• searching for the phrase “Why i can’t see images on this resource” found almost 700 links to apparently identical comment entries [Update 22 Oct 2006: oops, now this entry is the top result on that search!], and

• searching on Green_Monkey23 produced “about 206,000″ possibilities.

Wow, that handle is very popular: more than Dream_lover (about 5,650), Hot_chick (about 22,300), and even John_Smith (about 44,800)!

Sneaky and clever

But what’s so smart about this style of comment spam? Unlike the “very cognitive” and similar comments, it can be made on just about any site without worrying about context. And because they want their stuff to be read, concerned bloggers and moderators will leap into action to find out why Opera users can’t see images on their pages.

Hmm, I’ll (grudgingly) hand it to the spammer, that’s sneaky and clever.

Karma

While I’m on the subject, I’ve got to say that I’ve been pretty happy with Spam Karma 2 as an anti-spam measure on busier WordPress-driven blogs than this. It’s been pretty effective in cutting down the crap and freeing me up from the daily spam purge. Maybe it’s time to install it here in this little backwater.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 10:59 pm.
This page is no longer maintained and the information above is probably out of date.

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