A few months ago I was lucky enough to have VIP tickets to Katherine Wilson’s event in NZ Fashion Week. I’ve since been following Katherine’s blog. Most days I don’t have time to read her posts but for some reason today’s entry caught my attention.
On Cheating
The article, itself, is absolutely fine. What has amused me is that Katherine has been sucked in by the low life types who post comments asking for advice on their relationships and life.
Its not ewhoring, but it is a close relative.
People who want to leave comments in blogs have to get them past spam filters and then blog owners.
First up there are the filters that look at content, sentence structure, links in the post and the IP address. What could be more benign than girly angst about relationships?
Once your comments are being accepted the filters mark your IP address as clean/safe/trusted.
The blog owner might be slightly perplexed by the comments but is more likely to be flattered that their opinion is being sought and that their blog has the kind of reader who will open their heart.
The spammer is now all set to run automated systems to spam links for paying clients over targetted blogs. Comments on posts where the blog is set to auto approve or auto-after-x-comments will go live immediately and the blog owner probably won’t notice. Moderated blog owners will probably see equally benign content and still approve.
When I saw this post I thought I’d make a helpful comment explaining how this situation had come about and all day I’ve watched other comments go up but mine has obviously hit some sort of road bump. It can’t be that I’m not known to Katherine because nor were her help seekers. Is it because the truth hurts?
This post this comment was added to is 5 years old, the outgoing link is broken, the image link doesn’t work yet the writer found it worthy of a bookmark? Yeah, right.
And just incase you are doubting that spammers could really be behind this – check out this screenshot from the promo site of one of the software packages (click to enlarge).
You know that Katherineisawesome is not Katherine Wilson?
No, that’s embarrassing. How did I get those wires crossed, I wonder?
I need to stick to my techie stuff, that I know 🙂
And while we’re at it, here’s a new bit of fail spam on a sales thread at digitalpoint. “Your Blog is so perfect!” #fail
what responses are you referring to? i have read all of the comments on said post in which none are spam.