Last night I got my first bonafide blog comment spam! Two comments showed up four minutes apart on an older post (the post titled, “Not Your Father’s Sesame Street“) that have nothing to do with that post—in fact, it’s kind of disturbing that they would show up on that particular one, since it’s about kids’ television. I haven’t yet decided what to do with the comments, whether to delete them, or let them stand for posterity but kill the links, or what. At any rate, I was looking into where they came from today, and thought I’d post the details here. Kind of a Transparent Society type of thing to do.
Both comments originated from the same IP address: 24.195.207.220. Checking the Apache server logs, I found that they got to my site (directly to that post, in fact) from a Google search for “adult weblog”, offset 370 (meaning that they had paged through at least 370 results—37-ish pages—before finding the link to me). Other than that, though, there’s not much to report. I just thought it was noteworthy (to me, at least) that I managed to garner some comment spam.
I guess they’re trying to get their links associated with those search terms?
I’d have thought you were relatvely immune to blogspam since you use homemade blog software. Perhaps you made your comment-form too compatible with Movable Type or something. Maybe you should change a form field name?
On the other hand, there are some losers out there who will take the time to manually fill in a contact form on the web with spam.
I’d redirect the links on those posts to this blog entry.
My guess is they’re trying to increase their Google/search engine rankings by sprinkling links "from" me to them. Seems to be the strategy.
Homemade blog software doesn’t make you immune, at least not to live spammers (as opposed to bots, which do exactly as you imply–target known blog software like Movable Type which uses the same comment form format that make it easy to script for). Sam Ruby (http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/) has self-developed blog software I believe, and apparently gets a ton of comment spam. I think it’s more a measure of popularity of a site than what software the site might be running.
I like the idea of redirecting those links to this post–I think I’ll do that right now. 🙂