‘blog spam :(

Has someone worked out how to reliably game Akismet? I’ve just had to clear out 45 spam posts all within a few minutes around 6:30pm, then a few every 10 minutes to half an hour or so, until another bunch appeared around 11:15pm.

Quite how desperate for praise and/or attention to these spammers think bloggers are?!

Oh, wait…

It’s interesting to note the differing approaches taken – there was only one gibberish post, and most were blatantly designed to stroke the ego of the moderator. There was a interesting use of a standard template with a synonym generator for key words (“Hi I %1 this article and it was so %2 that I am gonna bookmark it.“, etc.) which actually worked quite well – or would have, had every variant of the message not been posted. What was most interesting to me was that there were a couple of messages in there without any apparent ulterior motive (other than to get the author trusted) and really were valid comments that would have appeared completely legitimate… had they not been posted to entirely different articles than those they would have fitted it with.

Mostly, though, the comments were tales of how the article in question was discovered; praise for a good subject, blog, or theme; or requests to use the content elsewhere. There were many comments regarding the benefit of Zunes, and a few mentions of iPod. Some were dumb enough to include ‘%BLOGTITLE’, unsubstituted. One complained about the volume of spam (ohh, meta-spam!). One change of tack made me smile: “my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.” – insulting the author into writing a response (… damn) – priceless! 😉

Stay vigilant, people – Eliza is out there…