I was just telling Ann, there's an article in guardian online, about referrer spam last Thursday, which mentions spam huntress! 'Guardian online' is an IT supplement to Thursday's guardian, a national newspaper in the UK. Not bad. A fairly mainstream press mention! It was a good surprise to read this on the way to work one morning. – Halz - 2005-08-30 12:48 UTC
Michael Pollitt, the author of that article added some more info about the same spammers on his blog. And he liked my spammed t-shirt visual. In his blog he says M0nkey admited he sold Reffy/PRStorm because he was tired of dealing with the nuisance involved (spam fighters) and wanted to move on. – Joe - 2005-09-01 18:05 UTC
I just wanted to say splog here. Maybe it will attract some visitors. ;-) It is amazing how much I am blogging lately, and much of it on the new term, splog. Splogs are a hot topic right now so might as well get as much traffic out of them as possible. We have known they exist for a long time, but now that some of the heavy weight bloggers are getting in on it and someone coined a catchy term it is taking off. – Joe - 2005-08-29 20:30 UTC
Hmmm. Lets make a page defining the word 'Splog' – Halz - 2005-08-30 12:56 UTC
For those of you who gave up on my blog since I wasn't posting, I have been pretty active in the last week. Not sure how long I can keep it up, but I have posted some interesting spam stuff recently (along with a bit of filler). – Joe - 2005-08-25 23:58 UTC
I used to check your blog now and then, but I admit it has been a while since I last checked. Thanks for the pointer. RichardP - 2005-08-26 04:21 UTC
In relation to the SpamAttractsSpamEffect. Here's an interesting thing.
The 'flashcom_wiki'…
http://www.ultrasaurus.com/cgi-bin/chiq/chiq.cgi?flashcom_wiki
…had attracted some conventional wiki spam (scumbags overwriting the whole page), but the ChiqChaq? software also supports easy appending of comments. It's quite a nice feature, but this brings in the blog comment spammers. And it looks like one blog comment spammer found the comment textbox, and then along came a whole load more. Presumably the first one 'xanax online' was a blog comment spammer with a bit of originality, and those that followed just did searches for 'xanax online'. But the interesting thing is that none of the spammers showed any interest in the 'edit' link which allows them to overwrite the entire page. They are all blog comment spammers, not wiki spammers.
So not only does spam attract spam, but types of spam attract similar types of spam. Not so surprising I suppose, but interesting to observe. – Halz - 2005-08-25 10:32 UTC
Yep, I have noticed this too, though I have never noticed such obvious proof. There are a few general form spammers that will hit any form they find. Then there are the more advanced ones that purposely do hit blogs and wikis, but a large percentage seem to just stick to what they know (which of course isn't much). – Joe - 2005-08-25 20:09 UTC
I just updated a record in our database. In recent days we've been hit by spam for air.searcheng.com. When I first found spam from them, I checked out their www subdomain and thought it might be worth sending them an email. But the spam didn't stop and they never replied. So I changed their database record which now points to searcheng.com directly. – Manni - 2005-08-23 09:29
Some interesting stuff I just ran across in my limited online connectivity:
Wikipedia Announces Tighter Editorial Control
Google Blacklists CNet Reporters
– Joe - 2005-08-05 23:51 UTC
What's up with China? That's what I've been asking myself this morning when I got another mail from a Chinese webmaster asking to be removed from our database. This time, it was ec51.com. He claims that he has removed all the spammer accounts from his free hosting program.
Before ec51.com there was oilpainting.ws. This webmaster wrote that he hired someone to do SEO for him. Which ruined his SERPs.
Either Google (or another search engine) is doing something that ruins their page ranks or something else has happened that suddenly makes those people aware of the problem.
I've already removed oilpainting.ws, but I'm going to wait a while before I remove ec51.com.
– Manni - 2005-08-05 08:53
I am glad you dealt with the emails. I haven't been able to be online much. I hope you are right that Google is doing something that is hurting rankings of spammer sites and those that host spammers (either because they don't care or don't know). – Joe - 2005-08-05 23:47 UTC