Whats With The Essays (Spam)?

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Picked up a spam comment yesterday – not your regular run of the mill casino gambling rubbish or random letters and numbers, but 12 A4 pages and 6,737 words (thank you MS Word) on why women are the favoured gender and “Christianity is a dumping ground for the disfavored” amongst other things. I’ve had two or three of these of late on this blog that slip past Akismet and have appeared on both LiverpoolAccess.com and TheFootballTimes.com. Anyone else in the same boat?

Interesting point, while my post yesterday suggested that 90% of all email is spam, the Akismet site reports that 93% of all comments to blogs are now spam as well.

Update: Looks like Rosanne (old college friend, female (yes, shock and awe of late!) blogger, fellow WIT BScIT/MM graduate!) is having the same problems… Rosanne is currently looking into weblogs as a learning tool as part of the masters, give it a read!

Comments

9 responses to “Whats With The Essays (Spam)?”

November 22, 2006

Rosanne

Howya Ken… that is funny because I just posted almost the exact same thing to my blog yesterday after I got a similar spam comment – not sure how many pages it would’ve been but it was really really really long!
November 22, 2006

Ken McGuire

Ah look who it is! Hope all the research down in WIT is doing you well! Should actually be down in Carriganore for a half-day unconference (not the usual conference) in January, been a long time since I’ve been to the college 🙁

The new spam is a strange un!
November 22, 2006

Rosanne

Tis still the same oul place down here! Although I haven’t been out to Carriganore at all, it’s meant to be very snazzy… Too bad it’s in the middle of nowhere though!!!
November 22, 2006

Paul Browne – TIPE

Ken,

I saw that as well – what puzzled me was that it wasn’t packed with dubious links like most of the other spam posts are.

Paul
November 22, 2006

Simon McGarr

I got two of those.
I vote for a crazy.
November 22, 2006

Richard Hearne

Pretty weird. I got one also and it was obviously a cut and paste job from a number of sources.

Not sure what they are at with those. No links.

The tin-hat part of me reckons there is some method to the madness. Whatever that method is though it cant be good. Something evil with this methinks.
November 23, 2006

Ken McGuire

I’d love to know what the method to the madness is though! No gambling links, no chance of buying viagra through the comments, none of your usual rubbish. Maybe those door-to-door preachers are taking their crusade to the next level? 🙂
November 23, 2006

Richard Hearne

Very weird all right. My first guess was some sort of probing of askimet. Or perhaps a to see what blogs are more vulnerable.

Not sure if they are using the same text over, but it would be pretty easy to track where the comment got through and then target those sites for mass spamming.

Just a thought.
November 23, 2006

Ken McGuire

Could well be, I know myself I’m on version 1.12 of Akismet with the latest being 1.2.1, maybe an upgrade will catch it. They’re not the most regular of comments either (in terms of timing) but I’ve seen one or two different variations of them so far.