Thread

Hello folks.

At my blog, mackenty.org, I talk about educational technology stuff. I’ve been getting really well crafted comment spam! I don’t think this is human, but the comment is appropriate to the article, and always includes a link to personal injury lawyers.

I agree that both formal and informal use of video games have a positive effect on the human brain.  Logic and reasoning are the primary brain functions used solve problems in video games, and stimulating these areas is beneficial for their use in other “real world” issues.  I agree that formal use could be more effective.

—
Corey M.
http://www.avvo.com/immigration-lawyer.html Immigration lawyer

Has anyone else seen this? I am being targeted by humans or this just a really good bot? All my open stories have at least one of these type of comments. 

Warmly,

Bill

Is it signed with the same name each time?  Are each of the comments relevant to the article?  Maybe it’s a real person who reads your blog and also wants some cross-linking to their site.  An opportunistic commenter vs. a spammer, perhaps?

I certainly haven’t seen comment spam that’s relevant to the article.  That would take a high level of sophistication for a bot and I’m not sure it’s really worth it (for the bot’s creator).

Is it signed with the same name each time?  Are each of the comments relevant to the article?  Maybe it’s a real person who reads your blog and also wants some cross-linking to their site.  An opportunistic commenter vs. a spammer, perhaps?

I certainly haven’t seen comment spam that’s relevant to the article.  That would take a high level of sophistication for a bot and I’m not sure it’s really worth it (for the bot’s creator).

It is always signed with a different name, and the comments are appropriate to the post; the interesting thing here is the posts are always linked to a personal injury lawyer (usually at www . avvo . com) personal injury has absolutely nothing to do with my posts, but the comments are spot-on.

My blog is pretty low-traffic, and really tuned into a tight, specific topic. Hmm. I don’t see the value for the site’s google rank or anything, and if they are hiring people to write the comments, it doesn’t make economic sense.

I’m more just curious if anyone else has seen this - like, it just doesn’t click with me.

I’ve seen some spam like that, too. It appears to be relevant to the content, though it could also be impressive gibberish. Seems like a big waste of time and effort if it’s not a bot.

It is always signed with a different name, and the comments are appropriate to the post; the interesting thing here is the posts are always linked to a personal injury lawyer (usually at www . avvo . com) personal injury has absolutely nothing to do with my posts, but the comments are spot-on.

I’d classify that as spam then.  That’s fairly advanced for a bot.  I’m kind of impressed.  What do the commenter’s email addresses look like? IP addresses? Any commonalities?

I haven’t bothered to track down IP addresses, as the posts are few and far between, but the commonalities are 1) sophisticated post, 2) lawyer.

Unfortunately nowadays there are actually people (sorry - read that as morons) who are paid to post these spam posts. I really don’t see why they’re paid to do this and also where the people paying them pick them up from because if anyone ever approached me to do that I’d go along just to report them to the authorities. Pesky blighters they all are!! :-(

Pesky blighters they all are!!

I wonder what impact an online Hall of Shame™’ would have on such sites. Put up a web page highlighting the offending site, describe how despicable they must be to hire spammers to promote their site/services/products, then send them the link to the page.

An exercise in futility, yes, but with a degree of satisfaction.

The comment spammers that are truly moronic are those who, on a site with a clear moderation notice, enter a comment with this: ksjdhf lkjgd lhiuyrw. Then, even after getting the moderation notice again, still put up another comment. Morons.

Six months of viewing Bushim videos is not enough punishment.

We get this kind of spam constantly at paidContent.  As far as I can tell it is real people at least in our case.  Always on topic and relevant but at the same time definitely spam.  The only way we can stop it is via blocking their IP address as the other methods just don’t prevent this kind of thing.

Jamie

personally I think it’s bots using keywords and phrases in the topic to respond.

I wonder what impact an online Hall of Shame™’ would have on such sites. Put up a web page highlighting the offending site, describe how despicable they must be to hire spammers to promote their site/services/products, then send them the link to the page.

An exercise in futility, yes, but with a degree of satisfaction.

Unfortunately I don’t think it will stop people like this. First off they are getting paid to do this so they probably couldn’t give two hoots about peoples livelihoods, secondly finding out who actually is doing it is very very difficult. These are usually quite clever (although possibly mentally insane) people so they cover their tracks very well. If you do find them then you show who they are on your site or any site then they will just target you more than ever and may even bring your site down. Unfortunately not really worth it.

Best thing to do is to report the IPs to your ISP or some governing body and hope that they can or do do something about it.

If it’s real people, this is just horribly depressing.  How desperate do you have to be before taking this kind of work?  I’m always surprised to see that people make money off this kind of thing.

If it’s real people, this is just horribly depressing.  How desperate do you have to be before taking this kind of work?

Unfortunately don’t have the answer to that one but it must be quite a bit I would imagine. Either that or the work is going to people who don’t really understand what it is that they are doing and so that’s why it carries on like it does.

I’m always surprised to see that people make money off this kind of thing.

Someone’s always making money on everything somewhere, fact of life unfortunately. :-(

personally I think it’s bots using keywords and phrases in the topic to respond.

These are some pretty impressive bots then.  In our case at least the spam is really on topic stuff.  It doesn’t have that slightly false ring that computers usually have when trying to fake this kind of stuff.  I thought it might be bots at first too. 

And besides the fact that it is intelligently written it’s also usually spaced out quite a bit from one submission to the next and not in a “regular” fashion.  In my experience bots either pound the heck out of the submit button or they space it out regularly.

Anyway, my guess is some poor person in a country where people are cheap is being paid to do it in most of these cases.  But even then that doesn’t explain the whole story.

In one case we even chased it down to a person within the company who the spam was directing people towards.  Turned out to be a case where it was a rogue employee that was doing this without the permission of his superiors.  Even more interesting was that it wasn’t a lowly employee sitting in a cubicle in a third world country somewhere.  It was someone farther up in the company who I suspect was well paid.

If your site’s audience is either large enough and/or valuable enough it can make it worthwhile to actually manually do this kind of thing.

Jamie

yeah I see your point. I do know there are companies that you can hire to do this. Primarily they are forum posters. People who are trying to get a forum going can hire this company and they’ll register a butt load of people on your forum, and start posting on topic threads in your forums, and respond to them as well to keep topics going. The thought is it will bring in traffic and then you can stop the phony stuff.

So I would imagine those same companies would also be available to comment spam blogs too.

When i ran my political blog and it was very busy, I’d get a few that I could tell were people, but I also found some that were bots. Have you taken strings of the text and googled it to see where else it’s being posted? that’s how I determined whether it was bot activity or real. the bot stuff, even though it looked good, was exactly the same wherever it was posted.