They’ve tried flattery, they’ve tried clever links … now they’re trying humiliation:

The following time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one. I mean, I do know it was my option to read, but I really thought youd have something fascinating to say. All I hear is a bunch of whining about one thing that you would fix in case you werent too busy in search of attention.

Too bad this comment was posted on an image ATTACHMENT. So there was no whining to comment on. Even if I follow the comment back to the article, it was about the importance of not whining when things go bad and moving on with your life. Tracing back the link revealed that no, there was no real person behind this: there was an apparently fake blog that was actually an invitation to some kind of ad network. Apparently they keyword matched the text of my article with the comment in an attempt to get some attention.

So: nice try, but bad spammer, no backlink.

-the Centaur

In more detail, my methodology: my moderation software asked me about this comment. The comment was not obviously related to an article and was badly written, so I drilled through to the referenced post and found it was an attachment. It’s entirely possible that someone clicked on the parent article, which did reference whining, then clicked on an attachment in an attempt to post an irritated comment. But the person’s email address was for an ad network, the linked-to-blog seemed to have unrelated articles, and on my second visit to the blog the ad network tried to take over my whole screen (yay Google Chrome for saving me!). People don’t generally have email addresses that are the same as spam networks, so I classified the comment as spam. It was a new kind of spam, so I’m posting about it.

UPDATE: Ooo, ooo, I forgot the best part of the methodology: do a search for a long phrase in the spam to see how often it appears on the internet. You can’t do too long – the spammer may be using software that introduces slight word variations – but if it’s long enough to be unique and it still shows up everywhere, you’re virtually guaranteed the comment is spam. I don’t care how repetitive a commenter is, nobody is going to write “The following time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as much as this one” on “About 847,000″ pages, according to Google.

… especially the spammy kind. Let’s do a little naturalistic analysis, a little data collecting, shall we?

• Maintain up the beneficial work mate. This website publish shows how well you comprehend and know this subject.
  -Mr. “Traffic Generation Promotion”
• I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success.
  -Mrs. “How Men Date”
• hi very good blog here, you can list it on our site for more views
  -Mr. “Ads Classifieds”
• This is a really good read for me, Must admit that you are one of the best bloggers I ever saw.Thanks for posting this informative article.
  -Miss “Belly Fat Burner”
• Unbelievable, that’s exactly what I was seeking for! You just saved me alot of work
  -Sir “Miles the Car Guy”
• I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success.
  -Ms. “Refinance Loan”

What are the keys? Lack of grammatical or logical sense, not apropos to the articles, text repeated over and over again from different posters, names that are obvious commercial scams, sites that are obvious commercial scams … and some that are bizarre cries for help from deep within The Algorithm:

Why did you remove my post… My post was actually useful unlike most of these comments. Ill post it again. Hiya guys, I spottet a great way to make a lot of money online creating blogs. I expect this is primaraly for the website admin but there are probably alot more bloggers reading this. I have already made thousands using the techniques detailed in the product and it has only been 2 months.

Now, there are some that aren’t bad … almost close enough to get you … again, if they didn’t show up again and again, and weren’t posted by “Mister Cheap Free Viagra Guy” at iscamu@suckers.com.

Sigh. Fortunately a friend of mine out here for the Rush concert is a WordPress blogger and keyed me in that I hadn’t enabled Akismet, WordPress’s built in comment spam fighting plugin. Doing that now…

-the Centaur
P.S. What really gets me is that these spam comments are arriving at the blog of someone who actually studies spam. I know The Algorithm doesn’t know that, but still…

Some time back I received a spam email that was blank. This is understandable, actually; probably just someone trying out a list of email addresses. I also got one containing the cryptic text “podmena traffica test“; this turned out also to be a “spoofing traffic test”. Now I’ve got a bit of comment spam, which also seemed mysterious, until I dug into it a bit. From my email:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post “Why I Write“:

I can not participate now in discussion – it is very occupied. I will be released – I will necessarily express the opinion. [url=DELETED]acheter levitra[/url] This rather good idea is necessary just by the way

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

The deleted URL is to a French eBay site, “acheter levitra” is French for “buy Levitra,” which is a brand name of Vardenafil, which is, of course, a Viagra clone. So this is essentially random pseudo-English text with a “buy Viagra” link, depending on the 1% of people who click on such links and the 1% of people who buy to pay for the cost of putting this spam on my blog. Charming.

Comment reeejected.

-the Centaur

UPDATE: I got a similar post of with a less obvious spam form, targeting one of the more popular pages on my blog (can you say pooound cake?):

“I found this site using [url=http://google.com]google.com[/url] And i want to thank you for your work. You have done really very good site. Great work, great site! Thank you! Sorry for offtopic”

But the [url=XXX]TEXT[/url] pattern was a dead giveaway. A search on Google for [centaur] – SO anyway, a search on Google for that nonsense revealed that the exact text of that comment has appeared elsewhere. So this is just more comment spam, trying to see if comments are unmoderated here.

Comment flattering! But reeejected.

Recently I’ve been getting a lot of pointless “spam” with a reasonable sounding subject line but a body that only says “podmena traffica test”. Mysterious, and pointless, from a spam perspective; so I assumed it was some automatic program testing a variety of addresses to see which ones bounced.

Finally I decided to track it down, and while I don’t know for sure I’ve now heard a good hypothesis:

There seem to be some strange spam emails doing the rounds, with a body text of “podmena traffica test”.. what gives? It makes a bit more sense if you transliterate it into Cyrillic, which leaves you with a Russlish phrase “подмена трафика тест” and that simply translates as “spoofing traffic test”.

Trying to verify his logic: Romanizing “podmena traffica test” gets me “подмена траффица тест”, as predicted, and translating that back to English gets “substitution traffitsa test” which is close enough.

The specifics of the message I’m seeing don’t match the description in that blog post, but it’s enough to make me think that the author has nailed it: it’s a Russian spammer testing out addresses and more importantly web servers.

Mystery solved! Now quit it, spammer guys.
-the Centaur
Update: I keep getting this spam. I have now received this spam almost 60 times in the last month, according to Gmail.