Whats With The Essays (Spam)?

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!

9 Comments

  1. Rosanne November 22, 2006 at 1:23 pm

    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!

  2. Ken McGuire November 22, 2006 at 1:27 pm

    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!

  3. Rosanne November 22, 2006 at 1:55 pm

    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!!!

  4. Paul Browne - TIPE November 22, 2006 at 2:13 pm

    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

  5. Simon McGarr November 22, 2006 at 3:54 pm

    I got two of those.
    I vote for a crazy.

  6. Richard Hearne November 22, 2006 at 9:52 pm

    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.

  7. Ken McGuire November 23, 2006 at 8:42 am

    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? 🙂

  8. Richard Hearne November 23, 2006 at 9:16 am

    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.

  9. Ken McGuire November 23, 2006 at 9:47 am

    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.

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