Posts Tagged ‘Spam’

Ever since I rebuilt my website with WordPress and imported my blog from blogspot I’ve kept an eye on my server error logs.  I like to make sure people who arrive here from the old blog or from other links end up where they were looking to go. While I’ve redirects that catch almost all of the possible routes in I want to be sure and checking the error logs gives me a way to spot any I’ve missed.

I just went through last months logs.  Of the around 250 error pages served there was a rather annonymous blog page that needed redirection setting up for.  It accounted for 5 of the hits.  10 were typos or calls to deleted pages. 60 were bots trying crude hack attacks on the site trying known vulnerabilities in a variety of software. That left around 170 that I’d not been able to explain.  Every one a call to a comments page that when I checked didn’t exist. The address was a unique combination of a unique comment number and the page the comment had been posted on.

2006/02/more-thoughts-on-the-game-without-a-snappy-title/comment-page-1/#comment-9940

I’ve seen 404s like this for months and couldn’t work out why they were appearing.

Then it struck me what they were.  Those comment pages were for comments that Akismet caught as spam. The only way (short of brute force which would show up in the logs) that someone could know the combination of the comments unique ID and the page it had been posted on was to be the original poster (or the spam system that posted it) .  Those 404 pages must either be the spam bot coming back later to see if it worked or some other system running quality control before paying out for links to a site having been created.

I’ve not had a chance to match up spam messages to 404s because I keep my spam logs clear but I’m going to keep an eye on it and see if they support the idea.   I’m intrigued to see how often they check a comment, if they come fromt the same IP as the spam message and how long after posting they check.

Allegedly.  I’ll come to that in a minute.

Most spam is annoying but once in a while the bots assemble two random concepts that make a slightly surreal or scary combination.  Once in a while those are so out there and look so like real messages that they make it past the spam filters.  Here’s one I got today (I’ve pixellated out the site’s info not because I don’t want to embarrass them but because I don’t want to give them any publicity) about my post about gobos the other day…

I’m not going to go into the rubbish about SEO other than to say if they’re link building this way how do I know they’re not doing all sorts of black hat SEO that’s going to get them blacklisted as a bad neighbourhood and do me more harm than good.

In this case the bot found some of my recipes and some of my stuff about gobos and decided that there was a chance that there was some sort of long tail search that it could optimize for.  Given the money being mentioned for some of that kind of automatically written content it’s no wonder that companies are trying to get in on the act.  This one though takes the biscuit.  Or as the American’s might say the cookie.  Cookies are made with Cookie Cutters which is a term sometimes confused with gobos although strictly speaking cookies and gobos are not the same thing which is why I think the bot may have made its blind leap of machine logic.

What I find funny is the idea that they would include gobos in a recipe database.  Gobos.  Pieces of glass that are etched or otherwise treated so as to project images or patters from lights.  I can’t help thinking they would be a little bit chewy and might cause some indigestion.  Not quite as funny as Monty Python’s Albatros or Crunchy frog but not too far away.

Anyway it amused me but I’ve not explained the Edible Underwear connection.

So what does any of this have to do with Edible Underwear?  Not a lot really other than something that happened when out drinking with some friends who do a bit acting.  They’d been eating the left over sugar glass props (bottles and some glasses used in a fight scene) from a play to see how one of the bar staff they knew would react.  One young lady who was normally quite prim and proper who had probably had a bit too much to drink said it tasted like edible underwear and promptly went a fetching shade that matched the beetroot red of the wine bottle she was nibbling on…

The hardest thing I find about writing (after the actual slog of the writing part) is naming characters. It can become a real drag to find the right name and it makes the slog so much harder. So a couple of years ago I started using names pulled randomly from the names of senders on spam messages. Some stick and end up used into the final version and some get replaced once the stories finished and I’ve time to think about a better name during editing.

When I posted a list of 13 of them as a Thursday Thirteen it was great technique that saved me no end of time and felt less like hard work than using books of names, random generators or other methods.

Now I have a problem. Where I used to have 1200+ spam messages to pick from I’m down to about 400 and the names have become really poor. With only a fraction being names and not just random gobledygook. The same is true of the constant stream of comment spam to my blog: of nearly a thousand spam messages caught by Akismet not one has had a believable or amusing name. Its almost like its become harder to spam so spammers have become a bit bored and are struggling to get up in the morning to put the effort into their job anymore.

Its a shame because at least in the good old, bad old days of spam they seemed to take some pride in having believable names to try and trick you.