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What does comment spam uptick mean?

Posted By Mike Orren in Square Pegs on December 23, 2008

While no system is impenetrable, our registration system makes it difficult for comment spammers to post to our site in any kind of automated fashion. We've always had relatively little comment spam because it's generally not worth the time to register, respond to an email and fill out a profile before spamming.

But we've seen an uptick lately. It's not onerous yet, but I've deleted more comment spam in the past two months than in the past two years.

And they're getting more sophisticated. Today we saw someone post two fairly legit comments before a third one that was clearly spam.

So what does this mean?

  • Has our search ranking gotten so good that it's worth the labor? It doesn't appear so to me.


  • Has the economy gotten so bad that there are enough out of work people spamming for pennies?


  • Tangential to that, have innovations like Amazon's Mechanical Turk made human-posted spam scalable?
    • Other theories I'm missing? At any rate, rest assured that we'll continue to be quick on the deletion of spam.


  • Staff
  • Verified User
  • Anonymous

Teresa Gubbins, says:

i do so appreciate the new user's name and avatar photo, though

Staff

11 months, 1 week ago
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Billusa99, says:

It's all the fault of that stupid Hawaiian Spam cafe up north. Their clients have gone hog wild.

Anonymous

11 months, 1 week ago
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Scott Doyle, says:

What are the primary topics being spammed, aside from sex toys and smoking? Pretty sure the correlation here is that you can't have your post-vanilla-sex cig in public...and that's infringing on YOUR RIGHT AS AN AMERICAN!!!

Verified

11 months, 1 week ago
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Mike Orren, says:

What are the primary topics being spammed

Schools, drugs, drug treatment

Staff

11 months, 1 week ago
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Collin Gouldin, says:

There was one promoting a soundtrack on some record label.

Verified

11 months, 1 week ago
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Scott Doyle, says:

Not renaming any major street possible to your ethnicity's preference? What about gun control, birth control, creationism...all the above conglomerated?

Also, what's the most off-the-wall spam to date? Black-market appendages that may or may not come with hep?

Verified

11 months, 1 week ago
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Mike Orren, says:

The soundtrack was pretty off the wall. And today's sex toy spam was, ahem, interesting.

Staff

11 months, 1 week ago
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Jason Rice, says:

Of all days I should pick to pay attention to may gainful employment. Rats.

Verified

11 months, 1 week ago
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What do you think?

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