I get between ten and fifty spam comments a day that feature long lists of linked urls.
WordPress, by default, moderates all comments with more than three linked urls.
By default. Like, I don’t have to know anything about blogging or spam for this to happen. It does it for me. I assume other blogging software does similar stuff. So these comments never get through. Never.
So if the spam never gets through, what’s the point? Who is it reaching? Who is the target audience?
Seriously, I have no idea.
But if you scroll past the list of moderated spam comments, it’s kind of funny. It all blurs together, so you end up seeing things about having anal sex with vicodin.
The problem with web spam is it’s even cheaper than email. It only needs a vanishingly small proportion to appear for it to be worthwhile for the spammer. I added arbitrary random delays into my comment forms so that my site costs them more to spam, but I think it’s not enough of a delay to be much of an inconvenience for real commenters.
I have the same problem although the spam comes in the form of junk article submissions. All article submissions on my website are moderated so the only person who ever sees them is me.
I don’t understand how it’s helpful to the spammers to waste their time posting junk article submissions to my site that never get posted anyways. I just delete them when I spot them. Articles won’t appear on my website without my approval so the spam never sees an audience outside me.
I get the feeling these spammers are just robots or programs anyways. Does anyone know if they are really people taking the time to craft and manually post the junk or if it’s automated? Just curious.
It’s bots. Anyone can buy a program that will spam post whatever addresses they want.
So you buy a program and it auto-runs; how many people have to actually respond to make it worthwhile?
It’s not even the normal spam that kills me, because I understand that many people equipped with little more than email and ignorance will click through, but blogger spam? Aren’t bloggers just a wee tad more savvy?
It’s usually bots – but sometimes there’s a person in the loop, where they’re either looking for very specific keywords, or they’re looking for sites that link back to another specific site. Sometimes there’s a person in the loop to bypass the CAPCHA test used (the funny-shaped nonsense words used to verify that you’re human). Some porn spammers trade free porn in return for people cracking CAPCHA codes.
But it isn’t just advertising, the links are actually worth something – they’re trying to game the search engines that crawl these sites. By leaving comment spam, your site contains their keywords, along with a link to their site – which in turn boosts their Google mojo.
Okay, that’s unfair to Google, because they’re pretty good at weeding these spambags out – but other search engines aren’t so good.
As for how may people need to respond to make it worthwhile? For email spam, I think you only need a 4% response rate to make it pay off, and there you need to purchase the list of email addresses in addition to the server time to blast out your spam. I’d imagine that the economics of comment spam run even more in favor of the spammer – there are no lists to buy, just some cheap software to run. They probably can break even or profit at 1% or less…
Sorry… that was probably more than you wanted to know 😉
Actually, protected, that was fascinating. Thanks.