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.
March 3 2011, 15:35:04 UTC 6 years ago
March 3 2011, 16:10:27 UTC 6 years ago
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March 3 2011, 15:55:49 UTC 6 years ago
(I'm flattered, except that it's commenting on lyrics to a song about a psychotic killer with a cursed sword. :) )
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March 3 2011, 15:49:47 UTC 6 years ago
March 3 2011, 16:15:01 UTC 6 years ago
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Sadly, they do
March 3 2011, 15:54:22 UTC 6 years ago
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.
Re: Sadly, they do
March 3 2011, 16:15:23 UTC 6 years ago
But thank you for the filter note!
Re: Sadly, they do
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March 3 2011, 15:55:21 UTC 6 years ago
March 3 2011, 16:10:19 UTC 6 years ago
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March 3 2011, 16:05:32 UTC 6 years ago
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. :-)
March 3 2011, 17:28:51 UTC 6 years ago
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March 3 2011, 16:22:00 UTC 6 years ago
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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March 3 2011, 17:29:09 UTC 6 years ago
March 3 2011, 17:10:23 UTC 6 years ago
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.
March 3 2011, 17:29:39 UTC 6 years ago
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March 3 2011, 17:40:07 UTC 6 years ago
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.
March 3 2011, 21:03:16 UTC 6 years ago
Fair.
March 3 2011, 18:04:53 UTC 6 years ago
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March 3 2011, 19:19:07 UTC 6 years ago
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.
March 3 2011, 21:03:45 UTC 6 years ago
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March 3 2011, 21:04:36 UTC 6 years ago
Yes, it does.
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March 3 2011, 23:39:44 UTC 6 years ago
March 4 2011, 03:08:03 UTC 6 years ago
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,
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March 4 2011, 06:36:50 UTC 6 years ago
March 4 2011, 15:20:07 UTC 6 years ago
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March 4 2011, 13:40:16 UTC 6 years ago
[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...)
March 4 2011, 15:20:19 UTC 6 years ago
(And I agree.)
March 4 2011, 20:59:11 UTC 6 years ago
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.
March 5 2011, 03:51:35 UTC 6 years ago
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.
March 5 2011, 05:28:35 UTC 6 years ago