Archive for the 'spam' tag

Just wanted to mention that we get a lot more attempted spam here at Freethought Blogs than I ever remember getting at the old blogspot address.  Luckily, the spam filters are pretty good and I usually don’t have to lift a finger to mess with it.  I do, however, see a few posts a week that slip through the cracks as “uncertain” and drop into the moderation bucket to be checked. To give you an example of what spam looks like these days, here’s a post from last night by “Nicolette Snith” Thanks for an unbelievable post, would see your personal others posts. thank you your thinking for this, I felt a trifle strike by this text. Thanks again! You commit a great aspect. Displays the beauty through great facts here. I believe that if a greater number considered it like that, they’d have a very better time frame get the grasp ofing the difficulty. That’s a pretty common variety.  It’s lavishly complimentary, totally unspecific, and almost written in a reasonable style of  English.  It only looks weird if you take the time to actually read it carefully. Obviously the goal of spam is to drive traffic to commercial sites, and this seems to be accomplished by adding a URL in the user identity, which you can click from the person’s post.  It used to be the case that most such URL’s were in the form of obviously suspicious locations, i.e., “http://hotgirls.ru” or something like that.  (I just made that up, but I checked and it’s a real site.  I do not take responsibility for you surfing there or wasting any money.)  These days, however, the address is more often in the form of an IP address (such as 123.123.1.2) which redirects you to a site that wants to sell you viagra or mortgages or whatever. The behavior of spammers and spam filter writers very closely resembles the evolution of predators and prey in nature.  Each side has a survival motive to improve.  The spammers are...
Read more