"Good Work, Nice Web Paqe" (sic) - is this spammers trying stuff out?

Eden
11/28/2005 4:10:00 PM #

Maybe someone is using it to send a very short encoded message.  The preceding text is always the same length and starts and ends with a z, eg. z861c150a0cd496c8355284d0904c611fz, za92bc1c4dd1b127b113e52826b6f644cz, z960e07760d59938b953f5385b994dd72z.  Or maybe several need to be combined to form part of a larger message.  Okay maybe I'm getting a little carried away ...  It most likely is some wally testing out his spam tool.

JosephCooney
11/28/2005 4:24:00 PM #

I love the idea that those strings form part of some kind of encoded message. Luckily my tin-foil hat prevents them from reading my thoughts through the screen. I'll let you all know if I discover any secret messages...

Dominic Cooney
12/1/2005 6:19:00 PM #

Is it another language? e.g. if I write ??? here, what shows up?

Dominic Cooney
12/1/2005 6:20:00 PM #

Hmm... guess it's probably not another language!

Jack
12/13/2005 5:39:00 AM #

So 'z',32 characters,'z' ...  I suppose that's a pretty solid way to put a filter into place.



I had gotten a number of these with the "Nice design, good work !", but am now getting just the "Nice design, good work !", without the 34 characters of rubbish ...

Alistair Lattimore
1/19/2006 6:07:00 AM #

I have a different idea, consider this scenario:



1) Spammer posts a 'marker' on your blog, with no links and a 'nice' comment.

2) Spammer subsequently comes back to your blog and checks if that post (with the unique marker), made on date X is still visible (ala: hasn't been moderated as spam).

3) If the post has been moderated, move onto the next blog. If it hasn't been moderated, he knows you've got lose security on your blog and its about to be open season.



If I were a spammer, I would be working out more efficient methods to get a higher submission to existence ratio. A spammer only has x many hours per day to deliver as many 'effective' spams as he can. If he stupidly chooses to drop a single spam comment, into every post on every blog - without knowing that they will exist in a months time - he is burning up the hours in the day for wasted spam. On the flip side, if he drops a single comment into a single post and subsequently comes back to check for its existence - he suddenly knows that every subsequent spam to that site is likely to exist in the future.



To be an effective spammer, its all about getting the spam to exist into the future. If you post it and it just gets deleted, then your spam was useless.



I'd call it 'smart spamming' and if the spammers aren't doing this already, they are wasting their own time, their clients and ours.



Al.