For the last couple of weeks, we have been getting posts with one-line compliments on our forums, e.g.

Wow!!! Good job. Could I take some of yours triks to build my own site?

Nice, isn't it? Well, not when you get a lot of those, from anonymous posters, and accompanied by strange, and sometimes outright spammy subjects (the subject for the above post, for example, was "adipex-online").

Now, compliment spam isn't new. But those usually come with a bunch of spam links attached, sometimes openly, sometimes thinly veiled as "please visit my site".

What's interesting about this particular spammer is that all of his posts are missing the spam links. At first I thought it may only be a test run and the actual spam would start later. But by now I've come to the conclusion that it's simply a broken spambot. read more

Found this in our referrers (not with that IP address, of course):

127.0.0.1 - - [11/Mar/2007:01:31:56 -0500]
"GET /forum/viewtopic.php?forum=10&showtopic=73804 HTTP/1.0" 200 42499
"http://search.blogger.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=amateur+sex+video&ie=UTF-8&ui=blg&sa=N&start=10"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC4.0)"

And indeed, there was a forum post with these keywords, right in the middle of an otherwise harmless discussion about wikis. And it had been sitting there for 6 weeks. How embarrassing ...

So, always check your referrers - you may find other things than just referrer spam.

Vxnqbt crhpa azwdxp bial ifwnzu shjbqeuyc? Why yes, I have two of them, please!

It seems someone found the need to test their spambot. After over 400 attempts to post random garbage like this to our calendar (of all places), I decided to switch anonymous submissions off for the moment ...

<a href="http://www.jubd.frkmzsauj.com">odynw wuflga</a>
vxnqbt crhpa azwdxp bial ifwnzu shjbqeuyc yjxho
zlgk dfkh
zlgk dfkh
gdqztwbpv, vubrjxizl@mail.com
vxnqbt crhpa azwdxp bial ifwnzu shjbqeuyc yjxho

These aren't new, but I've been scratching my head over them for a while: Trackback and Pingback spam for Google searches, e.g.

http://www.google.com/search?q=epwefnsr
http://www.google.com/search?q=pvarioxu
http://www.google.com/search?q=qfceusgw
http://www.google.com/search?q=mwryzvew

The search phrase is always complete gibberish (never a real word) and it's never the same twice, as far as I can see. And at least today, they seem to come in pairs: A single Trackback and a single Pingback from the same IP address.

What are those about? It's clearly someone experimenting, but what are they trying to accomplish? read more

Dear stupid trackback spammer at 81.95.144.66,

in case you haven't noticed yet: None of the trackback spams you have attempted to send to this and a couple of other sites over the last 24 hours has made it through. They are deleted automatically, and I didn't even have to block your IP address ...

Sincerely,
The Management