It’s the Little Victories That Mean the Most
Posted on December 11, 2006 Posted by John Scalzi 15 Comments
Happiness is: Finding the common element in the hundreds of spam comment messages one has been getting, popping it into the spam filter, and watching dozens of subsequent spam messages fail spectacularly. That’ll make me happy for days, or until the spammers figure out a workaround.
I had no idea it took so little to make you happy.
Well, inasmuch as I had to clear out 400 comment spams this morning, it’s not that little.
Nothin’ says lovin’ like Spam warmed over…
Dr. Phil
I noticed you were still getting hit pretty bad when I checked the threads early this morning.
Glad you were able to deal a little spam-death.
Most of the comment spam seems totally random and pointless.Why do they do it?
Comment spam has little to do with the content and everything to do with the link back. They’re using the links in the comment and in the name field to raise their Google rankings. It’s all complicated and stupid.
But mostly stupid.
Hmmm, warmed up spam.
400? No wonder you’re happy.
Something common to all spam and not regular comments, eh?
Hmmmmmmm. My first guesses would be character encoding or containing an image file.
Eddie
“…a little spam-death…”
la petite spam morte? Err…no, I really don’t think I want to think about that any more. I’ll leave that to everyone whose mind I just polluted with that imagery.
Is Google doing anything to help combat all this spam? Like, I dunno, trying to track which ones get deleted for being spam, and then blacklisting them from rankings considerations, or somesuch.
I’m not entirely sure how Google would do that on anything other then Blogger, which they own.
Jon Marcus:
“I’ll leave that to everyone whose mind I just polluted with that imagery.”
…Gee, thanks. Now I feel compelled to doodle something. Ugh.
Well, it’s their rankings that seem to be causing a lot of it. Can they really, in good conscience, sit there and do nothing?
(I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that…)
But see, getting a herd of message spam is a measure of your popularity. I hardly get any. I get more trackback spam, more meaning one or two a month — and I have figured out how to stop trackback spam from repeat postings, finally.
The rankings themselves don’t cause problems, but people trying to manipulate the rankings. Michael Specter wrote a nice piece about how Google works (which isn’t all that complex in principle), just type “michael specter google” into Google to find the article “Search and Deploy”.