What is the point of the comment spam I'm getting?

September 25, 2008 1:59 PM

I've got a personal site/blogg-ish thing and I get comment spam. The odd thing is that much of it doesn't contain any links. It's just some random words. What is the point of this?

Here's some samples:

exclamatory transitory economic Dada stabling zone kappa thrown 

Posted by diet no ionamin pills prescription @  61.86.48.145 on Thu Sep 25 07:47:31 2008.

mightiness work swooped hark hells pariah 

Posted by 30 phentermine sale @  202.105.182.87 on Thu Sep 25 07:46:42 2008.

I mean obviously in this case it's from some sort of shady online pharmacy, but there are no links to that pharmacy site anywhere in the comments, nor even it's name. So what is the point of this link-less, sales-pitch-less spam?

posted by ChasFile to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I would guess that your blog is filtering out links from the spam, leaving the randomly generated phrases that they use to try to get past other types of filter.
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 2:11 PM on September 25, 2008

It sounds like a slightly more sophisticated variant of the "5-digit" spam that's been asked about a couple times previously.
posted by contraption at 2:24 PM on September 25, 2008

Usually blog comments permit people to include a URL or an email address which is attached to their name on the comment. That's what they're relying on. The spam would have been a link on the name "30 phentermine sale etc.".
posted by Class Goat at 2:29 PM on September 25, 2008

And the reason for the weird words? It's an attempt at bypassing, or poisoning, a Bayesian filter, if you had one.
posted by Class Goat at 2:30 PM on September 25, 2008

It could be that their URLs were filtered by your blog software. Or they are seeding the page with keywords so that it ranks higher in google for those kinds of searches, so that they can come back later and post a URL to their pill-shelling site. Since hosting of spamvertised sites tends to rocky (i.e. gets taken down shortly after going up) they want to pre-seed their target spam blogs with keywords so that when they do come back and actually post the URL they can gain as much googlejuice from it as possible during the short life of the spamvertised site.

The random words that don't have anything to do with pills are just filler to bust any Bayesian filtering module that you might have installed.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:22 PM on September 25, 2008

I wonder why the blog would filter the URLs but not just block the comment entirely, though. Presumably if a real person wanted to post some links they could find a way to bypass the filter. And it seems a little odd to strip out links while leaving everything else. It would make a legitimate comment with links look strange.

It's also possible that this is just "empty spam" adapted to blogs.
posted by Rhaomi at 11:18 PM on September 25, 2008

Don't claim to be tech savvy, but I hear a lot of those have a 1 pixel transparent image that comes from some web site somewhere, and it's just checking to see if the addy is still good. If the image pulls from the site, you're now a target of opportunity (and not blocking images, either).
posted by unrepentanthippie at 11:34 AM on September 26, 2008