You may not have noticed, but I have recently been deluged by piles of noxious comment-spam. I delete it as quickly as possible (a task not helped by the awkward Movable Type interface), and wonder why anyone bothers. The ads don’t last long, so they can’t reach many eyeballs, nor can there be much chance that Google will see them and pay them much attention.
My theory is that people have been fooled into spending hours of their time placing ads in the desperate hope of some commission from the outfits being advertised. They were probably recruited by spam messages in the first place. Certainly, a number of the links being advertised seem to have been “personalised”. For example, they contain strings of digits in the domain name, allowing the site at the other end of the link to determine which sap-on-commission placed the ad.
This theory at least explains why what must be a very ineffective form of advertising continues. Why else would people waste their time? The large variety of IP addresses from which the spam comes also suggests that there are lots of people doing it. Nor does it seem likely that it’s being done automatically: an automatic approach would surely blanket every possible entry. Instead, it seems as if the spammers come to the site via a Google link, and hit an entry or two before moving on.
All depressing stuff. Still, this story from Ireland is heartwarming: it tells about a system-administrator in Ireland helping in the arrest of a 419 (Nigerian fraud) spammer. The other advantage of being comment-spammed is that it forces me to look at a whole variety of my old posts, from before I moved to corollary, and I often fix them up to use my new HTML templates properly.
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