Spam

Since moving to my own hosting arrangements, I've seen a lot more spam - both via email and in comments left on this website.

The email spam doesn't surprise me - it's almost all attempts to sell me dodgy pharmaceuticals, with a smattering of very dodgy programs sent to me masquerading as {tax|hotel|car rental} refunds or claim forms for lottery wins.

Nothing there that's really unexpected...

The website comment spam is a bit more interesting though.
I use various techniques to trap spam, but a tiny amount still leaks through. (At the time of writing 3,211 comments have been submitted, of which 3,054 were deflected automatically.)

Some of it is for undoubtedly fake designer dresses by Karen Millen.
(Your guess is as good as mine, quite frankly. My audience here is probably not their core market...)

A good chunk of it is advertising - can you guess? Yes! Dodgy pharmaceuticals!

It's the last category I find oddest, and most annoying. They're just one line (badly spelt) comments with a platitude, often a thoroughly inappropriate one. No links, except they usually fill in their website (an optional field) with Yahoo!'s URI. Oh, and the subject is usually filled with a solid block of garbage letters.

I think that they're either probing my defences, or trying to set up a "good reputation" with my filters to allow them to spam later.

All that happens is that they slip through, I can them as spam, and when they return they find their IP address more likely to be blocked.

Much of the rest of the spam appears to be very crude attempts at search engine optimisation - linking to barely relevant stuff, to try and raise its position in search results.

It's getting better as time goes on, and my spam filters learn more and adapt to their practices.

But it's still annoying.

The thing that really gets me is this... Who the hell is falling for spam these days? When it's that bad and that blatantly obvious, who the hell is clicking on the damned links?

How can spam still be profitable?

How can people be that stupid?

"No one ever went broke in Hollywood underestimating the intelligence of the public." ~ Elsa Maxwell

I'm not sure that's limited to just Hollywood, Elsa...