RAMH has seen a boost in its site traffic over the last week — not in the number of visits to the blog, but in the number of pages read per visitor. Just as one example, over a 25-minute period last night 60 pages were “read,” all by one visitor: pretty amazing for a blog which, until last Wednesday(ish), averaged fewer than two pages per visit.
Without getting into a lot of detail, in short, I’m getting lots of attempts to post comment spam. One attempted spam comment — let’s call it a spomment — per post. Each (with a few exceptions) lasting no more than a minute. The posts themselves aren’t being visited — the “reader” is jumping right to the comment form. All of these bulk spomments are trying (apparently) to sell name-brand shoes: walking shoes, boots, and so on.
And all of these bulk spomments originate from pretty much the same location: Beijing.
I corresponded briefly about this with the doyen of RAMH’s overseas contingent, Froog, who lives and works in that city and is as far as I know my only connection there. (On his own blog, roughly concurrently with the onset of spam at my end, he’d written of a sudden burst in Internet service disruptions at his end. That post of his was only the most recent in a loooooong and probably ongoing series about his problems getting — and staying — online.)
Most likely, we think, his service disruptions have nothing to do with my bulk spomments. Someone over there may have found RAMH via Froogville, or vice-versa, but is probably just testing, successfully, workarounds for the little reCaptcha word-verification scheme which I use here.
At any rate, the spomments’ contents take an interesting form. If you look at a given batch, you’ll notice that the messages are identical — though different from one batch to the next. Each spomment is a literary-sounding (but clumsily Englished) passage littered with a handful of hyperlinks, and if you jump right over the hyperlinks while reading it, the passage makes a sort of sense. Sorta. Kinda. Like.
Last night’s barrage was especially amusing, especially when you consider they’re — ostensibly — trying to sell you walking shoes (emphases added, shoe brand and of course hyperlinks removed):
We should so live and labor in our cheap [brand name] shoes time that [brand name] shoes sale what came to us as seed may go to the next [brand name] walking shoes generation as blossom,and what came to us as blossom may go to them as fruit. This is what clearance we mean by progress. It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
7 responses so far ↓
1 DarcKnyt // Oct 28, 2009 at 7:31 am
These spommentors are very clever, aren’t they? I have no idea how they get past the defenses, but MAN! … now, if they’d just dedicate their minds to good instead of spomments …
2 moonrat // Oct 28, 2009 at 9:40 am
hahahahhahaha. i suppose i shouldn’t be laughing, only this happened to me a couple months back. eventually i blocked comments on old posts because they were competing with one another faster than i could delete them.
it is kind of funny. i mean, in theory, someone’s paid to do that…
3 jules // Oct 28, 2009 at 11:06 am
Ha. That is a particularly funny spomment, trying so hard to be deep. (By the way, I love that word — thank you — much in the way I like that yesterday Little Willow coined “7Impterview.” Brilliant of her.)
7-Imp keeps getting Russian spam. OH MY GOD so much of it. Craziness.
4 John // Oct 28, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Darc: Yeah — spommentors and hackers both. If they didn’t exist, why, who knows? We IT people might be regarded (at least among the ill-informed) as gods! :)
(Spommenting and hacking sounds like something a sickly housepet does.)
Moonie: It IS funny (so far!). With as much traffic as you must get over at your place, though, I bet it’s a lot more tedious keeping it at bay. Your assistant may need to dig up an appropriate small-furry-animal photo just for the occasion… maybe a meerkat, its eyes bulging, up to its neck in a swarm of termites.
Jules: 7Impterview. Damn. Wish I’d thought of that!
You’ve mentioned the Russian spam before, here and there. I get a lot of that, too, but the Wordpress software seems to catch nearly all of it. Maybe it’s got something to do with our different templates? or… or… or Wordpress plugins or something? (Heck, if Blaine hasn’t figured it out yet, it’s probably unsolvable!)
5 marta // Oct 28, 2009 at 2:13 pm
I read crazy English every day. Those spomments are brilliant–and so is the word.
6 fg // Oct 29, 2009 at 6:25 pm
“It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”
Wow, that’s profound for a Chinese footwear company, based in ostensibly non-religious city, hah ha
PS hope they give up and leave you in peace.
7 John // Oct 30, 2009 at 10:15 am
marta: A more recent round of duplicate spomments says:
This verges on a sort of Dadaist poetry.
fg: After the most recent round, I installed a very clever spomment filter, which seems to have made the problem go away. We’ll see, though; as DarcKnyt says, these folks are awfully clever!
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