Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

Security & Privacy

Blog and Forum automatic submission scripts

17 Dec 2004

A note to the spammers and potential spammers that come across this: if comment spam is so effective in boosting search engine rankings, then why is this blog entry so much better ranked than the submission scripts are? You’d think that if they were even a little bit effective the makers of the tools would be able to get a better ranking than I have.

Spammers are buying ever-more sophisticated tools to facilitate their comment spamming. These tools can find comment scripts, bypass many protection measures, and submit comments with alarming speed.

Perhaps we could make a dent in the comment spam by attacking these tools. Find shareware and “webmaster script” sites where these tools are sold, distributed, and marketed and get them shut down. A search for “blog submission scripts” will turn up lots of links to products (and now, I’m sure, this blog entry) that are designed to spam comments. Track these down, contact the places they’re marketed, like share*it and for the software to be removed from their catalogs.

After finding a spam package that’s being sold on share*it, I contacted them about removing it. I’ve removed the names and links to the product, because I don’t want to make it any easier for spammers to find products like this.

One of the pieces of software sold on your site is designed to spam weblog comments and message boards. Product ID [removed] is described and marketed as a blog spamming tool at [removed] Please don’t continue to add to the spam problem, and remove this product from your service.

If bloggers are powerful enough to take down a TV news anchor, I’d imagine that a concerted effort to choke off distribution sources would be successful as well.

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