Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

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Seriously, does spam ever work? Like, EVER?

So far this morning, I have deleted seven spam comments, and blocked the commenters from posting in my journal again. I have also deleted five spam emails submitted through my website contact form (which proves, I think, that we're training spambots to pass Turing Tests, since you have to prove humanity before my website lets you email me).

I read a web comic called Skin Horse, and pretty much daily, the comment section is kudzu'd by spammers, until one of the admins comes along and deletes the offers of cheap drugs, hand bags, imported wives, and free money from a bank in a country that doesn't exist. So far as I know, none of the readers of Skin Horse really want any of these things.

My message boards are in a continual state of "behind" when it comes to approving users, because we have to work so hard to not approve spammers.

And through it all...I don't know anyone who has ever purchased something from a spammer. Most people are so anti-spam that they reject perfectly legitimate purchases, because they've decided that they're "spammy." (This did not happen to me, thankfully, but a friend of mine was told, on their own journal, "I will never buy your books, because you're SO SPAMMY about them." Said friend pretty much confined talk of books to that journal. The journal is gone now. Because that's how much we fear being slammed for spam.) All spam seems to do is waste our time and make us paranoid about clicking things. It's like the TSA of shit you encounter on the Internet.

I do not want .jpgs and spam. I do not want them, Sam I Am.
Tags: cranky blonde is cranky, don't be dumb, technology
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  • 70 comments
OMG! Ditto! *sigh*
Bleah.
I wonder if it's just a way to boost Google rankings in general, rather than to get the regular commenter to buy from them. But I don't know who buys the products spammers hawk in general. (I mean, besides the scams that take advantage of people.)
That's a lot of the blog spam. I get posts in my spam filter like, "Great facts on an important topic," from some site selling counterfeit Australian boots.

(I'm flattered, except that it's commenting on lyrics to a song about a psychotic killer with a cursed sword. :) )

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

mariadkins

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

I have read the middle of that fourth paragraph three times. And it still continues to elude me that, if you are an author talking about your books on your book journal, someone considers that spammy. It just waves little hands in the air and dances around and doesn't make sense.
Yeah, well. I never said it made sense. If I came to your blog and constantly tried to redirect conversations to be about my book, that would be different.

mariadkins

6 years ago

A lot of people purchase from spam. If it's spam advertising a well-known brand, they buy from it because they know the brand. If it's spam that's clearly shady, they buy because they think they're getting a good deal on stolen goods (when they're usually getting a bad deal on fake goods).

Some state in New England shut down a "pills spammer" and seized something like $65M from their bank accounts (which they then had great difficulty returning - apparently nobody wanted to admit that they were both dumb enough to buy fake pills from a spammer and also that they had very small penii).

The blog and forum spam is different - it's not intended for people to read at all, rather it's intended to be indexed by search engines like google in order skew the results (SEO or "Search Engine Optimization" is the euphemism for that particular scam). If lots of blogs and forums link to www.scam.com, then it must be a major site, and should rank high in the search listings...

We've found that using Akismet (a free blogspam filter from akismet.com) kills blogspam pretty much dead - catches hundreds of spams a day and lets no spam through on our blogs (which let anyone post, without registration). Also, having your web pixies configure things such that user provided content has the "nofollow" tag set on all links removes the SEO incentive for spamming.
This makes me sad.

But thank you for the filter note!
The theory is that if they can reach 100,000 people, there's probably one who's dumb enough to give them money or a bank account number.
Unfortunately, if that weren't true, they'd probably be in a different business by now.

vixyish

6 years ago

madfilkentist

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

archangelbeth

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

How can an author discussing their OWN book in their OWN journal, which any of us can choose to read or not be at all "spammy"? That just makes no sense. If they were constantly personally emailing you about it, then sure - but posting to their own journal?

I enjoy reading your journal almost as much as I enjoy reading your books. Half the time BECAUSE you're talking about the books (or the world of the books, or the process of writing the books, or the things that inspire your books, or the adventures of your life when you're not writing your books, or just about anything really).

I don't consider it to be spam. Bacon, perhaps, but then bacon just makes everything better. :-)
I do not claim to understand.

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seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

Deleted comment

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

the_liz666

6 years ago

If I ran things, every spammer would be locked up in a cell where the only line of communication with the outside is e-mail. They would e-mail requests to the prison administrators request their next meal, bathroom break, doctor checkup, etc. When the approval comes back, they print it out and present it to the guard.


All they have to do is find the actual approval in the flood of advertisements for cheap drugs, hand bags, imported wives, and free money (all of which would of course be tailored to superficially resemble the actual "request approved" messages)....

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seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

dormouse_in_tea

6 years ago

Deleted comment

Oy.
I've been getting sooo many of those lately. Especially on role play journals I haven't even touched in years. "Nice blog, I really enjoyed reading what you said, it's so meaningful" on a post that says "I think I want to build a weapon of mass destruction".

And then there's the random splurt of Russian spam in my mail.

Continuing on the confusion of the journal for the book being considered spam.
I think I want to build a weapon of mass destruction. Just FYI.

scifantasy

6 years ago

mariadkins

6 years ago

kippurbird

6 years ago

This did not happen to me, thankfully, but a friend of mine was told, on their own journal, "I will never buy your books, because you're SO SPAMMY about them." Said friend pretty much confined talk of books to that journal. The journal is gone now. Because that's how much we fear being slammed for spam.

I understand why you didn't name the friend to whom this happened, but part of me wants to know who it was so I could buy MORE of their books.
Heh.

Fair.
mari concurs. and i'm getting more and more spam on twitter lately. :(
Bleah.

mariadkins

6 years ago

Some board/forum structures have experimented with having the first post or three by a new user have to be approved. Of course, without adequate signup protection (and CAPTCHA need not put its hand up here), it's quite possible for the admins to be buried in new automatically created spam accounts.
Sad but true.
I have started getting regular spam posts on a particular CF post. Just the one post. I have no idea why that post. And I can't set CF to LJ users only, for obvious reasons. So I just keep going in and deleting them and notifying LJ of the spammers.

I'd prefer an extra button that sends 10,000 volts back through the Interwebs to the originating computer, but they won't let me have nice things.
I am sorry we can't have nice things.

azurelunatic

6 years ago

Wired had a recent article on a Drake Equation for spam profits that figured out that a spammer could gross $7,000 a day. This world needs a vigilante superhero who tracks down spammers and inflicts necrotizing fasciitis on them...
Yes.

Yes, it does.

phoenixsansfyr

6 years ago

Considering that I and everyone I've ever spoken to about it delete spam without even looking at it I don't know how anyone can actually make money out of it. The curse of the information age.
The problem is that each spam email is sent to you, everyone you know, and a THOUSAND TIMES AS MANY people.

It costs pennies to send 100 million spam emails.
If even one person clicks through and buys something that earns you $2 in profit... you're making money.

If only one in a million people ever buy... that's still 100 people.
The link above with the experiment? Sent 935 million emails. 222 million didn't bounce. Of those, they had a clickthrough rate of 0.0127 - that's about 1 in 8000. Over 28000 people clicked the link.
0.266% actually clicked "Buy", that's about 75 people.

75 people out of 200 million. It's barely enough to notice... but the cost of sending 900 million emails makes those 75 idiots worth it.
Of those people,

the_s_guy

6 years ago

biguglymandoll

6 years ago

seanan_mcguire

6 years ago

The spammers have found ways around CAPTCHAs. I read that they set up fake porn sites that require people to fill out CAPTCHAs from sites they're trying to spam to get to the porn. Then that information unlocks the site for the spambots.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

hasufin

6 years ago

fayanora

6 years ago

Yes, Spam(tm) works fine as fritters, in sandwiches, with eggs, spam egg and chips, spam spam beans spam and spam, ...

[Starts singing]
Spam spam spam spam
Spam spam spam spam
Spam, loverly spam!

[Gets interrupted]

Can I have spam spam egg chips and spam without the spam please?

(The idiot who accused an author of 'spamming' their own LJ is, well, an idiot...)
Heh.

(And I agree.)
I suspect that the model doesn't actually revolve around successful sales.

Either...
1) They're technically fulfilling a contract in which the quality of the effort is not considered - say, a company contracts to an "advertising firm" which then subcontracts to someplace which swears that for $1000 they can reach half a million potential customers; they then spam the entire population of California and it doesn't matter to them one whit that it's all caught by filters. Or...

2) The spam is basically just a vehicle for malware or trojans. Maybe NOBODY will buy the product - maybe the product doesn't even exist at all - but surely if they spam ridiculous numbers of people, some number will be curious enough to click on the link *anyway*, and some number will have systems which are vulnerable to infection.
At the risk of sounding spammy myself, I covered this last year on my site: http://www.biguglymandoll.com/?p=555
It's incredible. I used to run a web hosting company, and the Number One Problem we had was not "can we make payroll" or "what's our OI this month" - it was getting the damn spammers out of my mail server. It's ungodly.
I feel your pain.
Excellent.