How Not to Spam My Blog
This site is like a series of letters to the world at large, stopped up with corks into bottles, and set adrift in the ocean from my little desert island. I don’t really expect anyone to read them, and would find a thoughtful answer astonishing, albeit gratifying.
There is no way to “log in” to this site, and no accounts or privileges to assume. I suppose someone could “hack” in and modify pages without permission, but I can’t imagine what they might think they could gain by doing so. I don’t sell anything or collect any information, and the site has very few readers. Anyone may read, and comment if they wish. Comments are moderated. That means I see them and decide whether to approve them or not. If I don’t approve them, they never appear on the site.
Two interesting kinds of spam show up in the comments. Both are computer generated and easy to flag as spam. The first appears as a random string of characters purporting to come from an email address that is also a random string of characters. No one could possibly mistake it for a legitimate comment. Would someone who understands these things better than I do please explain to me what purpose the operator of the bot has for this? Suppose I approve one of these comments. Would that make the site vulnerable in some way?
A little more creative are highly positive but generic comments along the line of “I’m so glad I stumbled across your page. I learned a lot from it and bookmarked it so I won’t miss any of your future posts. Keep up the good work!” At first glance, one might be taken in, flattered to have enlightened some total stranger on some aspect of existence. Then one might wonder, what specific point did I make that was so pithy and elegant? There is no clue in the text. Still, one might accept the comment as coming from a human and not a bot. That is, until one receives the identical comment from the identical foreign email address in reference to multiple pages in the blog. Some of the posts referenced don’t even contain any text that could be praised by a genuine reader. I mentally give Mr. Robot a point and mark them all as spam.
Is this kind of spamming inconsequential only because of the nature of my site? Admittedly, it is not typical. How might this kind of spam be worthwhile to a malevolent mental pubescent trying to take over vulnerable websites in general? Accepting the comment would mean publishing a web address associated with it where someone could conceivably click the link. Is that all you are trying to accomplish?
