In recent weeks, it has become increasing clear to me that someone out there is paying people to spam blogs at LiveJournal. As readers probably know, I’ve had dyork.livejournal.com for about 4 years now and although it’s not my primary blog anymore, I still use it for writing that doesn’t fit in anywhere else. I am notified by email when a comment comes in and lately they have pretty much all been short spam messages along the form:
Very exciting story! I like snow skiing and i practise it regularly, so i
completely understand you! <URL-related-to-skiing>
I of course removed the URL as I’m not going to help the spammer. This particular comment was to a post of mine back in February about the blizzard we had and the only real reference to skiing was the very last line.
This kind of spam has been increasing for me lately with the same basic idea. A very short comment that is tied into the text of the post. One spammer even ends the entries with a name, as many other real commenters might do. In fact, the comments look real, and often are the kind of thing I might very well let stand as a comment…. until you hit the URL and realize that this is just someone trying to sell stuff.
It’s an interesting change at LiveJournal. For so long LJ was “protected” from all the usual crap blog comment spam that plagues all my other blogs by the way commenting works at LJ. To comment on a blog post, you have to either be a LiveJournal user, or you can leave your comment as “Anonymous”. However, if you leave your comment as “Anonymous”, you can’t leave a URL associated with your name (as you can do on this blog and most others out there). This lack of a URL for commenters was actually one of the reasons I chose to leave LJ as my primary blogging platform. I wanted to know more about the people who commented.
However, this “lack” of a URL turned out to be a great anti-comment-spam feature. Spammers who were leaving comments with their spam site in the URL field were basically useless on LJ. I’d often laugh because I’d see the same blog comment spam showing up on TypePad (where I could see the URL) as I did on LJ – only on LJ it was ineffective.
It would seem, though, that someone out there figured out a way to make blog comment spam work. It would appear as if someone is paying people to go around finding quasi-relevant blog entries on LJ and leave comment spam – with an appended URL. It was probably inevitable… but it’s also quite sad. And it means more work for someone who just wants to write.
I’ve also had spammers send comments to my blog. Seems like they came from India. I just dumped them. My concern is that no communications realm seems immune from folks who feel they can create a business around it. Spamming makes sense. Another thing that bothers me is when prominent social media bloggers take on clients and, without mentioning the client relationship (transparency), they blog about them in highly favorable ways. I’ve seen it and I’m not blowing the whistle on a well-known blogger, but it bothers the heck out of me. I feel that when someone pays you, you need to mention it and be open and honest about it. Don’t you agree?
Neil, Oh, yes, my various blogs get an amazing amount of blog spam. It’s actually quite a pain-in-the-neck due to the amount of extra time it adds – even *with* anti-spam technologies. Here on TypePad, I have found the CAPTCHA’s work well to keep out automated bots, but just like LiveJournal I’ve found that there seem to be people being paid to enter in comments and go through the CAPTCHA process. Over on a WordPress blog (Voice of VOIPSA), we use Akismet for blog spam filtering and that catches an incredible amount of stuff – but still comment spam gets through. Last night I had to go into the moderation queue and dump 29 pieces of comment spam – and I’d just cleaned it out about 24-48 hours earlier as well. I can understand why spammers do it, as it undoubtedly does help drive traffic to their clients, but it’s annoying and abusive, nonetheless.
To your larger question of transparency, yes, I, too, find it troublesome when people blog about clients without disclosing that fact… it more calls into question for me their credibility, i.e. can I trust what they are saying? Or are they being paid to say that? We’re still working out all the dynamics of this social media world, but yes, this is one space where I definitely fall into the “more transparency is good” camp. (And try to always disclose any potential conflicts I might have, even if they aren’t always relevant.) Thanks for the comment, Dan
This kind of thing doesn’t surprise me, given the money involved in SEM these days.
It’s not even a new idea, either. And with cheap labour being the in-thing these days (I’m thinking of off-shoring comment spam to India and China) it’s relatively easy money…