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December 6, 2005

Blogging Hell - Stupid Spammer Tricks and The Weather Guy

by Ferdinand T Cat

As always, I am continually amazed at the combination of cleverness and rank stupidity behind spamming. The fake Rolex EMAIL spammers have begun using a technique in which they prefix each message with a personal little blurb. The idea is that you'll think the message was sent by one ordinary person to another, and it ended up in your mailbox by mistake. It's not a new concept, but I found this variation of the blurb to be something a little bit too truthful.

Chase

After work, I'm coming over so I can show you this ridiculous site.

Evangelia

There is also a new form of comment spam going out. This variant is able to bypass the normal restrictions using a clever new form of the anchor tag. Instead of

<a href="your site name">

they use

<a href="">

That's right, folks! They disguise the link by not putting it in the message.

In general, however, the comment spammers are slowly winning the race. There is now so much variety in the spam comments that you can't tell the difference between a spam comment and a real one unless you check the target site.

Perhaps the most bizzare target sites are the ones run by The Weather Guy. The Weather Guy has been hopping all over the web, uploading copies of the same incomprehensible text and linking the copies to each other, then spewing comment spam wherever he can find a blog. His sites are always at free web-hosting services, and have multiple pages festooned with buttons and links, but they only point to other places in his strange world. It's possible he's trying to Google-bomb himself into being the number one authority on the weather. Nonetheless, I suspect people who visit one of his sites will find the following forecast less than useful.

Click here
london
underground weather. Get info on undelground weater is weather underground tropical

weather underground minneapolis
weathel undelglound tropica etc.
the weather underground etc.
the wheatehr underglound and weather underground com with wetehr undrground cum by underground weather
com.

All of the links in the above passage point to the page itself.

I understand the need for advertising, even though I deplore the abuse of free resources to do it. But somehow, it's worse when the product being advertised makes no sense.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat

Trackposted to Adam's Fair Conditions, Choose Cloudy and Warm, Is It Just Snow?, Weather, Interesting, Funny, Pursuing Thunderstorms, Real Forecasts, Cold Front Nation, Those Tornadoes!, Jo's Cloudburst, and Basil's Squall.

# At Tue 6:23 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (4) | More Blogging Hell

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Comments

... and possibly worse than the spam / spammers are the countermeasures, or should I say the attempted cotnermeasures. Blogger currently suspect my site is a spam-blog and I need to type in 5-10 characters every time I hit publish ... sux0r!


... damned free services!
/TJ


Posted by: TJ at December 6, 2005 7:20 PM

Aaargh! Word verification sucks, TJ. I'm not understanding the purpose of this weather underground. It seems only to derve the purpose of consuming time and bandwidth. Or did I miss something?


Posted by: FIAR at December 6, 2005 8:00 PM

I've been getting hit with Trackback spam, and if I was just skimming, I'd've let some of it past the filters. It starts out with compliments about the blog itself, or the post, and then goes into "please visit my blog," and it's a gaming or other type site. Fortunately I'm small enough where I can moderate most everything, but I can't imagine what pain this is for others. And I have a good plug-in to stop most of this too!


Posted by: Jo [TypeKey Profile Page] at December 7, 2005 5:51 AM

Even though I have been intermittent in posting (real world keeps interrupting my online time) it still kills me ... I can't just hit Ctrl+S to publish ... ack.


Posted by: TJ at December 8, 2005 11:37 PM

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

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