Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: annoyed
  • Music: Monster High, "Fright Song."

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

Sadly, they do

lluad

March 3 2011, 15:54:22 UTC 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.

Re: Sadly, they do

archangelbeth

March 3 2011, 21:29:09 UTC 6 years ago

rather it's intended to be indexed by search engines like google in order skew the results

I wonder if the relative lack of spam on my LJ is because I have it flagged as "do not add to the Google collective."

Not very useful for a blog where you want to be findable in the Google collective, though. O:/