boakes.org » Spam

An article on SpamHuntress.com got me thinking laterally about some of the referral stats I’m seeing, and I’ve started to notice something curious. More…

A couple of years ago, a web page with an open comment form would have been used for commenting intelligently and considerately on the subject at hand or sending a message to the page author. Then, with the advent of Google’s page rank system, comment forms became the subject of massive misuse, because pagerank gave a higher rank to web pages based on the number of times they appeared on other sites. Spammers would use automated tools to mercilessly link and relink their sites on any and every open form. Having a high pagerank means coming first in search results, which for a commercial site equates to more sales: so comment spamming had rich rewards. More…

I spent a while chatting with StatTraq author Randy Peterman over the last few days, we’re both interested in how to remove (or hide) referral spam from site usage statistics in order that they may be a realistic and meaningful reflection of actual human visitors. More…

Over the last few days the referral spam tide has ebbed and flowed: for about a week, everything that came in was pointing to doobu.com, then today, there was a definite change in tactic as 15 new poker related domains (see the existing story on referral spammers for the updated table of details) were added to the ever growing list. More…

Today I’ve stopped getting hit by named domains for referral spam. At first glance this sppears to be good news. More…

The “Account Terminated” swamp got a little muddier over the last few days. More…

So; more tales from the “Account Terminated” swamp. I’m looking through my referrer spam from the last 24 hours and I decide to do a little whois checking. More…

I’ve recently been getting “referrer spam”. What happens is this. A program, somewhere, on some zombie computer, visits my website and when it does so it wells my webserver that it was directed to the site from website-x. More…

a quick note to the company that just left a test message to see if it would appear, and then tried to register in the hope of posting. why? if you’ve got the brains to be able to figure out how to do that much, you’ve no doubt got the brains to do some proper work, work that could influence and advance society as a whole, instead of spamming people in the hope of a big break that will almost certainly never come. use your nouse for something worthwhile eh? something of which your forebears would be proud.