If you’re running a blog and have posts with pictures you’ve probably noticed that you’re getting alot of comments that look legit but on closer inspection turn out to be spam. For example on one of my pages that I’ve got pictures of cats on I got a few comments about how cute the cat is with a link to one of those link farming websites with tons of links to stuff about v1aggra and r0l3x wtchs and other similar common spam.
I was puzzled how exactly they were getting comments that made sense and appeared to be written by real people and yet the links and email address’s were obviously spam ones.
Then I read this post on Mark on WordPress and suddenly realized whats going on, basically the spammers collect a bunch of blog posts with pictures on then display the pictures to people and ask to write a comment about the picture to proceed to there site or something like that… these comments are then posted as comments on my blog with the spammers url in the link field. It’s clever because the comment gets past the cursory glance that I normally give all new comments (I have have moderation enabled on my blog.) and it’s only if you actually look at the URL’s that you notice somethings a bit “funky”.
I’ve gotten more since then. I got a few repeats of the ones I deleted as spam, and some new ones. What’s really strange is one I got on a post with no images that had a definite spammy URL, but seemed to be responding to an earlier commenter… “I agree with X, [some opinion]” This is likely an adaptation to anti-spam services that Akismet that may be looking closely at the content of comments. Or, maybe they’re targeting people with less rigorous anti-spam methods, assuming (rightly) that a cursory glance will show nothing malevolent about these spams.