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Ask HN: "I'm impressed"-style comment spam
I get a lot of sign ups on a drupal site I manage that contain the following:
I am impressed, I have to say. Really rarely do I see a blog thats both informative and entertaining, and let me tell you, you have hit the nail on the head....
The bot seems reasonably sophisticated -- it's capable of scraping arbitrarily defined fields and filling them with junk (or that comment), and it follows signup verification links; however, it doesn't seem to submit any false articles, share any URLs, and the email address often dies quickly.
What is the point of this type of bot? Is it scraping walled data? It seems innocuous -- a minor nuisance at most -- but I doubt that is the case.
- nl 15y agoMany sites have a comment approval policy that only hold the first comment by a user for approval. Once that user has had one comment approved manually, future comments will be automatically approved. Spambots attempt to exploit this by creating likely-sounding content for a first comment, getting it approved and then spamming.
- rhizome 15y agoYeah, I'd call it "ingratiation," submitting comments just generic enough to pass muster. I also think it's a Mechanical Turk type thing, where the comments can just be pasted in reply to almost any blog post. "Yeah dude, you're the king!" Regardless of "rel=nofollow," there will be an URL to Ugg boots or NFL Jerseys or whatever.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]