Most of the spam that comes to blogs is blatant. It shouts. It wants you to do something or buy something, with no connection to the context it has landed in. When comments are moderated, as they are here, it’s a simple chore to delete them. Annoying, but easy.
The new stuff is creepy and insidious. It masquerades as a comment (bland generic usually positive). But ends in a URL. And it’s standard with WordPress to show name, email, and url for anyone making a comment, both as an identifier and as a way to make contact with an individual. So that’s two URLs.
And that’s the purpose. I can’t see any other. Let me know if anyone’s aware of a different motivation. Sprinkle your urls around the web, randomly, maybe every hundredth or thousandth gets a click. You don’t care about the inefficiency or waste of bandwidth, it’s free to you. It’s weirdly organic, like maple seedpods spinning as far as the wind will take them, maybe one in a million makes a tree.
Fake name, fake email, fake comment. Real URL. It took me a while to figure out what was going on and delete them. I haven’t heard any discussion elsewhere about them, but I haven’t really looked. So planting my ignorance as my flag, I’ll claim the discovery and naming rights: it’s SpermSpam. And it hopes you will be its egg.
I’ve left a few scattered here, with the URLs stripped. Can you spot them?
Trackback: myreh
#1 by Calvin Stoob on 20 November 12 - 5:35 am
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A genuine partner overlooks your main problems and can handle your main achievements.
#2 by mulswater on 18 November 12 - 9:32 am
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Really like. A friendly relationship does not link families as much as a hate can.
#3 by Crawford Bud on 27 September 12 - 10:25 am
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But wait, there’s more.
The URLs are not always live, as I had thought. Sometimes the website you’re being enticed to visit no longer exists. The little code crawlies roam on regardless and forever, having no point except having no point.
#4 by Sibyl Smirl on 29 August 12 - 11:35 am
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I tend to put URLs in my discussion e-mail, usually to provide backup for a statement, or reference, in case people want to know more on the subject, frequently to wikipedia or some specialized site. I don’t think that I do it in blog comments, but then I don’t comment on blogs all that often. But there are quite a lot of people on some of the e-mail Listservs that I frequent. Often the sites have advertising on them, but not _my_ advertising.
#5 by Bud Crawford on 9 September 12 - 5:36 pm
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URLs are the internet, the kernels of connectivity. We share third-party links with friends, we might have links of our own, websites we built or maintain that tell people who we are, what we do. We, as in human persons, not the corporate persons who are “people, too.”
The new style of spam doesn’t come from human persons: fake names, fake email addresses, fake comments. Only the included URL is real. Most of the ones that have come here have been from bulk email senders and sources for temporary domain names. Spam engines, auto-promoting. Quite weird, even a little scary: a self-replicating fractal regression of robot apprentice sorcerers, viral metastasis.