Attack of the Spambots

We have been besieged, as of late, with admirers of a suspect nature.

Spambot – excerpted from Wikipedia

Forum spambots surf the web, looking for guestbooks, wikis, blogs, forums and other types of web forms which it can then use to submit bogus content. These often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing, making it hard to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Other spam message are not meant to be read by humans, but are instead posted to increase the number of hyperlinks to a particular web site, to boost its search engine ranking.

This category of spambot has gained considerable notoriety since November 2006, with the introduction of XRumer, a forum and wiki spambot which can often bypass many of the safeguards administrators use to reduce the amount of spam posted.

With that in mind, we present the following which fall, in general terms, into the category of Fraud. All of the following were posted in response to Another brief aside.

Best Criminal Attorney (<- this was a link) You not planning to think this but I have misplaced all day looking for some articles or blog posts about this. I want I knew of this site previously, it had been a fantastic read and seriously aided me out. Have a fantastic one. Criminal Attorney Online

So, this alleged Criminal Attorney (we suspect that Criminal is used here as an adjective rather than a noun) has spent the entire day misplacing trying to find an article about an odd comment posted to a blog about Fraud. We are stumped as to what help our article could possibly have provided, but Thank you, Clarence Darrow, and we move on.

Contestant Number Two had this to offer:

I’m usually to running a blog and i really respect your content. The article has really peaks my interest. I’m going to bookmark your website and preserve checking for new information.

There was a web address in the poster’s signature but it didn’t go anywhere, so if it was an attempt to drive traffic or boost search engine positioning, sorry about that. As far as bookmarking us, if you truly respect our content, please, go help someone else.

More, from yet another buffoon:

After study just a few of the blog posts in your web site now, and I actually like your approach of blogging. I bookmarked it to my bookmark website checklist and will probably be checking back soon. Pls try my web site as properly and let me know what you think.

Given that our approach to blogging amounts to the vivisection of fools, we do not understand what the writer might like. Sadly, the website address provided was the internet equivalent of a vacant lot. You can not get there from here. Please, should you check back in, please check out – permanently.

P.S. You do not want to know what we think.

Which brings us to:

how to get pregnant (<- former link)
Never put all of your eggs in a single basket

Odd advice, to be sure. This at least went to another page. A page with thrilling articles such as “How to get pregnant with a boy”.

We did not read it. We have seen many schoolteachers in the news the past few years who may have.

At any rate, what to do with these and how to prevent them.

WordPress has a spam filter which caught all of these comments. From the dashboard, it is easy to delete them. If you have a blog, turn the filter on, unless you want the world to believe that you are the darling of the illiterati.

We feel that the only contribution that these comments have made is that the offer more proof that the old theory that an infinite number of typing monkeys would produce Shakespeare is untrue.

Fraud takes many different forms. Be vigilant.

That is all.

UPDATE 11/11/11:
Since posting this, 100% of the spam comments we have received have been alleged responses to this post. Is there some magic spam attractor secret word in here?