17.04.2007 ~ Comment Spam, for profit not pleasure
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wtfF0nzie: RT @eircom: Technology Career Opportunities #eircom are looking for "skilled specialists with expertise in a variety of areas" - http:// ...
Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:17:03
A friend of mine once remarked "You know you've made it when once you start getting comment spammed".
Ok, it wasn't really a friend - it was me talking to myself while watching scenery whiz past on my merry way to work. But for the sake of argument we'll call it my friend! And my friend wasn't wrong. As web-sites begin to claw their way up search engine ranks they tend to gather notice. Such notice isn't always benign.
Sometimes it's automated bots, sometimes it's drones of the human variety. Regardless of the possession of consciousness, these beings scour the interWeb for sites that allow any user to contribute content, be it to share a thought, spread a little praise or (in most cases) hurl abuse. In the past the usual victims were guestbooks and forums, now it tends to be the comment systems. Popular blogging software were among the first targeted in those innocent days. Bots (and the painfully stupid) were taught to send form information in a specific format, which would then be stored and re-presented by the target website, in turn directing traffic (and search engine spiders) off to the unwanted third party.
Google (and other search engines that uses link popularity as a component of their ranking algorithms) would consider the third party site to be more popular as a result of all the inbound links, and in return would boast it closer to the coveted number one slot on their results pages. To add insult to injury, owners who found their sites un-intentionally linking to these third parties had to deal with the loss of a measure of google karma (or google-juice... I'll explain another day!). Counter-measures quickly appeared, culminating in the now ubiquitous capcha.
Lately, for some reason, both deziddon.com and grabagaff.com have been subject to comment spam incursions. In grabagaff's case it's simply down to the forum software being old. No problem - easy to fix! Any leakers will be taken care of by the mods. In this site's case the solution is not so straight forward. Everything here is self-rolled (the comment system is very very simple, and as far as I'm aware is only used on one other site, so software popularity isn't a factor) - which would suggest human interaction in the spamming process (know to my friend as 'el SpammeRino').
Said drones have no difficulty completing a capcha and I'm unaware of any real deterrent to this form of 'el SpammeRino', with the exception of constant censorship moderation. But moderation takes time. On a site with a PR in the region of two (curse you google), time spent removing fake comments laced with rel="nofollow" links to penis enlargement sites that you've already tried just isn't worth the effort. I'll tidy the place up every once and a while (bookmarking the good ones in the process) in the run-up to rolling out proper openId support for backpage, in turn and in time only allowing authenticated users the ability to comment... because it's always more fun censoring people you know!
Hmmmm - does anyone else find the mental image of hundreds of people in sweatshop-like conditions, slaving away on rusting 75mhz pentium ones, seeking vulnerable sites in an attempt to wring every last ounce of google-juice for the nominated pill or porn site of the day just a tad ridiculous? There have to be better career paths available to these poor people! Manually masturbating farm animals for artificial insemination perhaps?
I wonder who will comment first...
Not completely Unrelated:
Having thoroughly stamped on Wikipedia's once popular standing (god bless the hive mind etc), Steven Colbert is turning his sights on Google. Having learned the term 'google bomb', Colbert wants to put his new found knowledge into practice and be returned in the numero uno slot for the search term 'Greatest Living American'. My work here is done!
Tags: 07, code, computers, disappointing, ffs, rant, right/wrong, spam, struggle, time_and_tide, work.