Spam with no purpose!

Tony John
Tony John
from Kerala
12 years ago

I am tired of a kind of spam in my sites and need some advice.

There are some spam appearing in the form of comments in all of my sites. We use the "captcha" style verification, but comments are bypassing it. It indicates the spam is posted by human and not automated systems.

I implemented a system to block the commenter by Ip Address, but the interesting thing is, each comment is posted from different ip address. They are doing some Ip spoofing.

All the comments are very generic in nature and not really about the article itself. Example:

Wow! great information. This is exactly what I was looking for. You made my day. Keep posting more articles like this.

Each comment is different and unique but are very generic and has nothing specific about the article under which it is posted. There is another interesting point - there will be 2 letters swapped in first few words each comment. Example: 

Wow! graet information

I changed the implementation, changed the CAPTCHA system, changed the fields used for commenting etc. No matter what I do, the commenting will adapt to the new system within few days and would restart.

Most interestingly, there is no link to any other sites from the comments. So, the commenter has no advantage in doing this.

Any idea why anyone would do this kind of a spam?

Replies 1 to 6 of 6 Descending
Tony John
Tony John
from Kerala
12 years ago

No, these comments are different. They have no links, no reference to any other sites and they are posted too many times a day. On an average, I get 50 of them per day. This means they are spending a huge amount of time posting them (unless they are automated and smart enough to bypass the CAPTCHA)

I am really confused on their intention.

Animesh
from Mumbai
12 years ago

They are human comments and their email ID and blog address serves as links. Captcha will not work, get some spam protection.

In my case, Ekismate takes care of that. All such comments directly go to spam folder now.

Pooja Pradeep
Pooja Pradeep
from Bangalore
12 years ago

What is this Ekismate?Surprised

Animesh
from Mumbai
12 years ago

Its a spam protection application. Not sure whether it is compatible with blogger or not. Works very well with Wordpress.

Chaitanya Kulkarni
from Mumbai
12 years ago

disqus is a good option to manage comments

Chaitanya Kulkarni
from Mumbai
12 years ago

in case of blogger/blogspot i mean ....

Chaitanya Kulkarni
Chaitanya Kulkarni
from Mumbai
12 years ago

Yeah Akismet blocks loads of spam, i use it as well, but there are ways to bypass that as well :P but it does block a substantial amount of spam for example : 34,417 total spam on one of my blogs and only 29 missed spam - 99.92% accuracy rate (last 6 months)  and an All Time 99.91%accuracy rate which is wonderful. or use something like disqus to manage ur comments. CAPTCHA is a formality, softwares can manage to bypass them anytime.

Animesh
from Mumbai
12 years ago

Yes, it has a good amount of perfection. Till date only one spam has been missed by it in my case

Madhur Chadha
Madhur Chadha
from Hyderabad
12 years ago

I am not too sure why those bloggers leave no links but i have a theory

1. By passing as genuine comments they prevent their email IDs and Ips getting blocked

2.Their Ids can become trusted in your site and get passed without any approval

3.If comment love is enabled they can get do follow links also

This all is preperation for a massive spam attack one day. Plus many of these comments have hidden code that can lead to malware attacks.

 

Ranjith
Ranjith
from hyderabad
12 years ago

I have no idea of what can be done but regarding the swapping of letters... they are not typos and it often happens with me too (I am not that person :-) G and R are so close to one another that they often get interchanged while typing fastly and carelessly, like me :-)

umesh derebail
umesh derebail
from Mumbai
12 years ago

John i feel that it must be related to your earlier troubles with MS, i hope you install Ekismat and get rid of the same as suggested by Animesh


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