Well, despite what I just wrote, I did see one interesting little experiment by, I assume, one spammer: He's using digg.com.
Obviously, this is spam:
<a href=http://digg.com/health/ACCUTANE_BUY_ACCUTANE_ONLINE_BEST_PRICE_1_67_PER_PILL>Buy Accutane</a>
<a href=http://digg.com/health/ACCUTANE_BUY_ACCUTANE_ONLINE_BEST_PRICE_1_67_PER_PILL>Order Accutane</a>What may be surprising at first is that the link still works, i.e. this post is still up there on digg.com. That's one of the principles of the site, though: The users decide what's interesting. And for things that aren't, they can vote them down (or "bury" them) until they disappear from sight, unless you're setting your threshold really really low.
I wonder what the spammer really gets out of it, though. digg.com - thankfully - doesn't allow automatic redirects, so even if you were to follow the link to digg.com, you would still have to click on the link there to get to the spammer's site. And at least in the above case, it should be clear to anyone by then that it's only spam and not some news article about the drug in question. So my feeling is that this can't be terribly effective.
Still, I guess there is a lesson the be learned here for those that are running one of those flashy Web 2.0 sites driven by user-submitted content: Even if your users "bury" the spam so that a normal visitor won't see it any more, it's still there and may be of some use for the spammers. I'd suggest using at least some basic spam filtering and actually delete those posts.
What I also found interesting were posts like this:
If you look for [url=http://digg.com/world_news/No_Digging_from_Burma_for_3rd_day]viagra[/url]
If you look for [url=http://digg.com/world_news/No_Gays_in_Iran_Iran_is_second_only_to_Thailand_in_number_of_sex_changes]buy viagra[/url]Now those posts have nothing at all to do with viagra - they are actual news posts on digg.com about completely unrelated topics. So this can only be some sort of experiment, e.g. to test if "digg.com" will let a post through even if it has "viagra" in it.
Another variation was to link to profiles of digg.com users that have "Dr" in their name, again using "viagra" as the keyword:
If you look for [url=http://digg.com/users/DrDmitriy]viagra alternative[/url]
If you look for [url=http://digg.com/users/DrStarvation]discount viagra[/url]
If you look for [url=http://digg.com/users/DrStarik]order viagra online[/url]
If you look for [url=http://digg.com/users/DrDeall]viagra sale[/url]Again, this can only be an experiment because I can't imagine what the spammer would get out of it if, even if someone were looking for Viagra and would click on those links, they would end up on the profile of some guy who posted a bunch of stories about the PS3 ...
I'll keep an eye on these sorts of posts.
Comments (0)
Damn Spam!
http://spam.tinyweb.net/article.php/using-digg.com-for-spam