Seems like my blog has been picked up by some spamming machine — at least I hope it is a machine, what a waste of manpower to manually send in spam since I am filtering all comments and not letting anything remotely spam-like through. Anyway, it is kind of interesting to see what kinds of things are being pushed using blog spam. Read on for more, but suffice to say that porn is dominant…Here is a simple diagram. Precise numbers are not really interesting, it is more the big picture that I wanted to analyze.
Comments:
- Most spam is for porn sites of various kinds. Strange that they need to advertise themselves, but I guess they could be temporary sites set up to spread various forms of browser-attacking malware.
- Replica handbags and watches come in second, clear market for scams and making money there.
- Viagra and tramadol-style substances are also very lucrative, especially for expensive fakes. I can see the logic.
- There is also a fair number of posts that I cannot make sense of immediately. Possibly, they are attempts at boosting search-engine ratings of the sites submitted as URLs to the posts… but since all comment links are set to “no follow” on this blog, that effort is wasted.
- Various financial services, especially payday loans, are the last large category.
- There are some interesting spams that just contain jumbles of letters (consonants only), and a link to a similar-looking URL. No idea why someone would do that, as nobody is likely to follow a meaningless link.
Overall, this follows the logic of spam of being pretty lucrative, especially selling various forms of overpriced fakes or replicas to people who seem unable to tell that a deal that is too good to be true really is.
If you control the server, adding a captcha will probably solve most of the spamming problems.
I read Björn Sunesons (a runner) blog at http://suneson.se/ and that one uses a nice home-made variant with questions like “5+4=…”. For a wiki at BTH, we’ve also made a home-grown version which completely removed the spams we were getting.
Of course some captchas are so difficult to read that even real humans such as myself fail at dechipering them 🙂
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I just added the akismet service to my blog… let’s see how much of the traffic that it catches.
To follow up: Akismet works very well. Seems to stop all spam, and the occasional real comment that is left in a moderation queue.