Here’s a follow up to the previous post. Some people may associate spam with e-mail but it’s a very real problem for a lot of interactive websites too. What happens is that spammers monitor lots of blogs, directories and pinging services and try to harvest as much comment links as possible. Then a spambot will try to post a fake comment with links back to the desired sites.
A few years ago one would encounter comments with a huge number of links and randomly selected words. Then the anti-spam software evolved somewhat and the spammers had to find new ways to spam so nowadays the comments are more carefully composed and if you glimpse over them quickly they could be easily mistaken for real content. However, the (fake) content of the spam is usually hopelessly out of context with respect to the original post so if you’ve read that it’s usually pretty obvious.
Here’s a sample of something spammed to one of my postings here at this blog:
I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them.
These are not just random words thrown together anymore. It’s obviously not composed by a computer but it is also not related to one of my postings to date. Also, the fact that that it was posted by “online poker” with a link back to a strangely named gambling site doesn’t really contribute to the credibility of this comment.
My guess is that the spammers harvest their content in very much the same way as their targets: straight from the web and maybe even straight from the posts they are spamming. I guess even reading <P> blocks and counting words (making sure it’s a real paragraph) is already a pretty effective and easy method.