Conversation with a comment spammer

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22 Jan 2007

Over at Adsense Chat a budding comment spammer posted a link to one of my blog entries about comment spam. He [expressed shock and amazement]( that bloggers don’t appreciate his activity. He seemed truly confused as to why people don’t like it.

Apparently this technique that is hated by alot of "Bloggers" out there. ... I was taught by some people that this is a "New way" to gain page rankings on google without having to pay for it. ... Believe it or not, it’s not welcomed. Apparently, you’re pond scum if you choose less costly methods to get PR.

I created an account and spent some time talking with this guy in the forum. Read the thread—it’s a fascinating look into the tiny little mind of a spammer.

I tried a gentle tack at first. I thought perhaps he was new to this whole internet thing and might not really get why people were unhappy with his behavior. It turns out I was right. Someone posted a quote from another thread in which he mentions he’s being building AdSense sites since November and is frustrated by the lack of traffic.

No wonder this poor guy is resorting to spamming. Someone has led him to believe there’s this magical land of free dollars flowing out of Adsense and all you have to do is get some traffic in any way you can. (Perhaps it was a Web 2.0 VC who gave him this idea, but I digress).

Dave Kaufman - Techlife
January 23, 2007 12:08 PM

Comment Spam meet Akismet. Akismet eat my Comment Spam. Matt's work on Akismet (comment spam eradicator) for Wordpress is so good that I have begged him to make email spam tools like this. He hasn't caved...yet. Basically he has the benefit of millions of users and has used that to create a system where we (all blogs) have keys that allow Akismet to parse our comments. And amazingly it learns from all the other junk. I get 1 comment spam a month at most. And the reverse is also true, it has not caught a false one yet. If it was not for this, I would not blog.

Philip Tellis
January 24, 2007 5:04 AM

He could have been trolling.

This discussion has been closed.

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