Smart Spam
I’m very, very impressed that this sort of work is being done; Web Design is getting stagnant with people using just styled
block-level elements to produce artwork. The incorporation of SVG into sites excites me a lot.
How long do you expect it will take for this sort of technology to be widespread?
Obviously you can only speak about WebKit realistically, but if it’s going to take ten years for IE Win to gain (full) support,
we can’t design with it.
I’m amused by the “Becoming more important” line in the first paragraph. This has been a HUGE problem for years –
ever since HTML-2.0 was introduced to be more of a layout language and less of a markup language. For an example,
you just have to look at this site. sex partners Why is all the text
crammed over on the left side of the page with a big blank space on the right side?
Why is the default font tiny and unreadable? Fortunately most browsers now let you override the latter problem.
Wow, I’m simply shocked.
Heh, that is pretty clever, but if it’s still going to include various porn-related words a simple word filter could hold back those comments for moderation.
May 9th, 2006 at 11:32 am
I’ve been getting a very unhealthy amount of spam lately as well, although it isn’t as “smart”. Before, the people would spam my comments with a few URLs, so I simply set comment moderation on for any comment that had more than 3 links. Well, now they are using their name for the linking, and just saying “Wow, great article!” or something, which is quite annoying. I’ve blacklisted some of the words, but it just doesn’t seem to stop them. At least your spam gets you thinking that the reply is at least slightly on topic before you notice that they just want you to click on some pr0n link.
May 9th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
I am very impressed by the web site. Keep up the good work, Marty said ;-)
(Not you Martin, the spam “marty”)
May 13th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
I get those a lot, Mike, and while to an extent they are “intelligent,” they are very vague and general. You could post a comment like that on just about any blog. However my blog, specifically about web standards and design, received a spam comment that not only referred to the blog’s general topic, but attempted to disguise its true purpose within a message that would appear to be completely relevant.
May 14th, 2006 at 3:35 am
I wish my site was cool enough for spam…
May 15th, 2006 at 10:23 am
I’ll send you some of mine, although its mildy entertaining for the first minute or so, deleting 40+ comments a day gets quite annoying.
May 16th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
I went into mine (it was getting bad, nothing getting posted but still), and I closed all my old posts and closed pingbacks. That has helped so much it’s unreal.
May 28th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
The problem with that, Mike, is that even now we wouldn’t be having this conversation. ;)
Most of the spam doesn’t get through. When I get a lot of traffic all at once, Akismet is exposed to new and different kinds of spam, so it has to learn how to deal with them, but overall it’s holding together really well. So far, Akismet has caught over 1,000 spam comments on its own!
May 28th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
[...] UPDATE: I just came across this article entitled “Smart Spam” at Slightly Remarkable, the blog of Jonathan Fenocchi. Seems the enemy has a new weapon. [...]
June 2nd, 2006 at 9:10 am
I had done it only on really old posts. I decided to leave my main page open as usual, most recent 8 posts or something. The thing was is I was getting spam comments on posts made over a year ago. Since nobody was posting on those old topics anyway it seemed like a smart thing to do. I find that the vast majority of legit comments are made within a matter of days after the item was published.
July 11th, 2006 at 9:06 am
I think thats just brilliant! – They will go to any length.
August 23rd, 2006 at 3:42 am