Reader feedback on bizarre no-link spam: A while back, Mark over at Boing Boing posted about some odd spam comments he’d seen that had no URL. If there’s no URL, why post the spam? In the last week, several readers have approached him with theories. Some of them are interesting.
I’ve found that many times innocuous-looking comments with no url are used to sneak past sophisticated blog-spamfilters […]. Many of these filters give a ‘karmic boost’ to commenters who already have one approved comment. By not posting any links at all, they have a better chance of getting their foot in the door […]
[…] If the spammer […] can attribute these numbers to a particular blog or email address, they can see which sites are ‘hot ones’.
I’ve long suspected that spam is (or could be) used by spies or (more likely) terrorist cells. There is so much NOISE in email, it’s the perfect place to hide SIGNAL.
Thanks to Akismet we’re almost spam-free these days.