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.
A 
