Spammers are getting crafty. And not in a "Let's Weave Baskets Together Kumbaya" sort of way.No, this is an "Every Day We're Devising New Methods to Force-Feed Your Quality Blog with Our Virtual Pork Snouts and Hooves and Clog its Arteries Like Those of an Obese Comedian on Big Macs and Speed" sort of way.
My patience is thinning.
The Spam's about to hit the fan.
Yep, these purveyors of processed pig parts are increasingly determined to make their messaging mine, and in any way they can. So instead of using robot messages, which get filtered out, they've found exciting new tricks to give their Spam a more individualized, hand-crafted, personalized touch.
Well, thanks for the thought, Spammers, but I don't take well to other people trying to foist crappy marketing on me, thinking I won't notice. I mean, I'm in marketing. I can add crappy content of my own, thankyouverymuch.
Yesterday, some yahoo who called himself "Phillip" decided my If Top Gear Tested Heelys Shoe Skates post-- in order to be 105% more Spamilicious-- needed the following comment:
"Sneaker Skates by Surfer being sold on ebay size 8"
Oh, really, Phillip? REALLY, PHILLIP?! My GOD, thank you for letting me know!
See, now, months after I'd posted that post which was NOT AT ALL about my need for sneaker skates unless I could get Richard Hammond to wear them, and maybe roll up and down the track for me just a little but that wasn't the point so where was I?...
Oh yes-- months later I see you, Phillip, do a Google search on "shoe skate comments" and decide to inject your little Ebay ad into the fun.
And, you know, the thing that annoyed me even more was-- it doesn't even try to be chatty!
Go take your shoe skates and enjoy a long roll off a short pier, Phillip.
Of course, this is on the heels of my battle with the Keyword Infesters.
These are businesses who-- either through bad SEO advice or by wholly uncaring intent-- have started showing up in the comments section of a blog like a cloud of locusts.
There they leave comments where their usernames are not legit business or blog names. No. They're all SEO keywords to lead to their own blogs when people do Google searches. That means, if left untouched, the comment section gets littered with commentary from "readers" like:
Good Plumbers, MA
Or:
Comfortable Socks
Or:
Electricians in Georgia
Or:
Excellent Quality Shorts
Not only is it extremely irritating to be used so cheaply and blatantly for keyword traffic, but it's impossible to have a rational discussion about anything with someone called Excellent Quality Shorts.
Into the bin with you all! Be gone, Ye Spammy Offenders!
And lastly, while I'm giving my blood pressure meds a nice workout, I want to talk about "Ad Ki$$ers."
People on social networking sites like BlogCatalog are probably well-familiar with these folks.
These are the people who leave you private shout messages telling you that they've "ki$$ed" your ads (meaning, purposefully clicked site sponsor ads with no intent to purchase, thus earning the blogger money but cheating advertisers) and that you should do the same for them.
These folks are the least intelligent of the bunch because they tend to neglect certain details. Like the fact that we have tracking software and can actually see they never visited the blog.
And having not visited the blog, they don't realize some of us actually don't have ads fer ki$$in'.
My response to this has been to report them. But not before I leave them a nice non-private message saying I, unlike them, will not engage in click fraud as they had requested.
Better pucker up those Ad Ki$$ing lips to smooch the rosy rear-end of the Google-meister, Spammers! Because you're going to have to do some serious sucking-up to retain your Adwords privileges.
So, there you have it. The battle is on. The eternal fight of good against evil. White hat versus black hat. Spaminator versus Spammer. Shaun of the Dead versus Umbrella Corporation--
Oh. Sorry. That's a different post.
Be careful out there, folks!
Question: What fun with spammers have you had lately?
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Humorbloggers
Humor-blogs
31 comments:
Those are always my favorites! The ones who say, "I kissed your ad, want to kiss me back?" when I have ZERO ads to kiss. I also get people who leave me a PM at BC who say, "your blog is very informative" and I write them back, "what did you find most informative?" and never hear from them again (my blog, while it IS informative--I can tell they didn't really read it).
Anyway, I have a lot of appreciation for this article! I have been getting a lot of spammy spam lately, myself!
Melinda
The spamming and splogging have gotten out of HAND!!
Yesterday, I was surfing for info on a new post. Let me back up. A few days ago I had someone email me with a question that dealt with my subject. I spent an hour replying. Never got a thank you, go to hell, or "your full of sh**. Yesterday's surfing found a site that had taken my email, added to the front and backend and posted it as their post.
In the fashion of Yakov Smirnov, "Blogoshpere, what a country!"
You know, not being as knowledgeable as most on this blogging scene, I had often wondered why people bothered to leave these nonsensical comments on my blog posts - especially old posts.
I smacked my head with a "Doh!" when I read this. How did I miss this obvious point? Thankfully I always delete them anyway, but now I will take pleasure in deleting them :)
Melinda- Oh, I know the Ki$$ing and other ad-lovin' has gotten entirely out of hand. And you're quite right about the "informative blog" comments. I know they haven't visited either one of my blogs when they don't bother to specify which one they visited. :)
Dennis- Oh, that is GUTTING! Did you send the person a little note on their post you so kindly (inadvertently) wrote for them?
Babs- Well, glad to have made sense of what really is a senseless tactic! Good you've been deleting them anyway.
LOL, GREAT post, spot on with a dash of good humour. I screen all my comments nowadays, but had noticed an increase in this new style.
JafaBrit- I understand the pre-screening. I hadn't been doing that, since most of the time it hadn't been a real issue. But if the spammers are going that direction, then so will I.
This is war! :)
Thanks for reading!
I say "Right on, spammers!" if they lead to hilarious writing like this. You really are a funny devil in spite of that angelic smile of yours.
Nothing Profound- The anti-Spam Hulk Rage has been building for a while now. :) It's not pretty, but it feels good. Thanks for checking out the post, NP!
This is hilarious. I particularly found myself snorting at the "Every Day We're Devising New Methods to Force-Feed Your Quality Blog with Our Virtual Pork Snouts and Hooves and Clog its Arteries Like Those of an Obese Comedian on Big Macs and Speed". Virtual pork snouts. That is so funny. And I can totally relate! I have new confidence to delete these bloghogs without giving it a second thought.
Cindy- Now you've got me wishing I'd thought to use the term "bloghogs"! :) That's a good one.
A few months ago, I finally got smart and added comment moderation to all posts older than 2 days (I found one old post with about 100 spam comments). I am amazed to see that I still get spam on those posts that go to moderation.
I've found that not getting any traffic virtually eliminates my spam challenges! This approach isn't for the faint of heart though. ;)
Cheers!
I've never been ki$$ed (hey, it's just like high school and my first three years of college!) but I get some interesting spamments from people like Acne Treatment and Play Baccarat. I think my favorite, though, was from Melatonina Melonine, which I think is a very lovely name. Sounds a little Hungarian or Czechosolvakian or something. I can easily picture relaxing with the dreamy Melatonina at a picnic near the lake.
Daisy- 100 spam comments?! Oh fer cryin' out loud! Stop the madness!
Richard- Aw, that's sad. But I guess it's better to have, er, discriminating traffic (doesn't that sound more upbeat? heh) than lots of spam-traffic.
Mike- I hope things work out for you with Melatonina... I bet she has beautiful skin. Make sure she wears some 15 SPF virtual sunscreen there at the virtual lake.
Are we speaking of the people who are so interested in how happy my girlfriend is with out love life and I need to increase the size of my penis? I responded back once to them just out of irritation that I was 7mo pregnant, have no penis and my dh doesn't approve of girlfriends.
I know it was pointless but it felt good! :)
Funny you mention it. Just today I responded to a Mike Duke, who works for some South African Research Company. Apparently, he's offering me 7 million bucks to help his company with some offshore research. I just told him where to send the check.
I'm rich, suckers!
Great post. Really great post.
I can't help but laugh every time someone announces (on BC) that they've ki$$ed my non-existent ads while not visiting my blog. I make sure to return the (non-)favor, of course. It's the least I can do after they go through the effort of making a generic and false claim.
(And, yes, this is my real name.)
Chyna- Fortunately, I seem to get those more via email than here at the blogs-- they get filtered out because they're sent in mass and they have trigger keywords. It's all this specialized, personalized attention I keep getting by the keyword spammers that's fun. I've particularly been trying to weed them out of TSR.
Dear Mr. Shorts/AKA Sneaky Omar :)- And those BC Ad Ki$$ers were getting pretty pushy there for a while. I think we all reported so many of them, most of them have been weeded out now. But about three weeks ago, it was nuts.
I return the favor by clicking the Spam Report button. :)
You'd think they'd be smart enough to (1) Use a normal-sounding name, (2) Leave a normal-sounding comment, and (3) NOT have an URL with the words "teen" and "porn" in it.
Having said that, your cartoon image is extremely disturbing. I remember that one. Gave me nightmares for months.
Virtual Pork Snouts and Hooves and would be an excellent name for a for a rock band.
By the way, I ki$$ed your ads.
:)
JD- But if they could do all those things, they'd be normal bloggers instead of sploggers! Now, we couldn't have THAT! :)
Da Old Man- Hm... maybe a new type of music, too-- country thrash metal. :)
And you little ad-ki$$er, my ads don't even know where you've been and who's been touching you lately-- you'll give them hospital cooties or something. :)
As you know, I recently wrote a post about SPAM myself. I noticed by the tiny twitter widget I have installed at the bottom that this particular post was retweeted twice.
I decided to see who RT'd it, and was stunned to see one of them was a Viagra spammer! Haha! The spammer found my post trashing spammers amusing enough to share it! LOL
I'm telling you, these people are not human!
Dead Rooster- Oh, that's mind-blowingly wrong on so many levels. I guess he was giving his fellow Spaministos the heads-up on new spam elimination techniques.
Y'know, so they can find a work-around.
Well, you know all about my love affair with "Jason" the guy who wanted to "exchange links". So far he's been my only nagging spammer. Ha, that's what you get for being popular, Jenny-T.
Yeah, I called you Jenny T. Weird, huh? Sorry....
Lisa- Ah- you know, I recently had a Jason come by asking to exchange links and it didn't register with me until now he might be the same Jason!
Re: Jenny-- as long as you don't sing 8-6-7-5-3-0-9 at me, we're cool.
I got that a LOT in high school. :)
I'm new at this (read: one week) so my blog hasn't yet pinged spammers radar. You've provided some great ammunition for that eventuality. Yes, I'm taking notes!
I know consumers can opt out of targeted advertising at The Network Advertising Initiative site. Could that impact spammers targeting your blog as well as your email?
Just make it really difficult for them to post. I have about three spam filters installed on my blog: a text analysis tool, a captcha, and e-mail verification. If they want to jump through all those hoops, fine. Drop an anchor text link, but leave some decent content on my blog to help my search engine rankings.
Dang, there may be advantages to being new and unknown--the spammers haven't found me yet!
-- on second thought--
maybe they did 'cause I'm receiving a high percentage of your RSS feeds in an unknown language ...Japanese, perhaps?
モバげーとスタビ、異性とのであいを探すならやはりこの2つのサイトは外せない。Mixiよりも遊べるサイトで楽しもう
セフレ掲示板で大人の恋愛をしてみませんか？割り切ったセフレと快楽のみを求めた恋愛をしてくださいませ
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