Scott on Writing

Musings on technical writing...

An Example of the Evilness of Comment Spam

Here's just one example how comment spam is making the blogging world a crappier place (warning: clicking on the following link may cause your browser to jack your computer's CPU to 100% for several seconds): http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/jonne%20kats/archive/2004/01/14/5589.aspx

This link is a blog entry from Jonne Kats asking the blog community if there exists an easy-to-use control for WYSIWYG editing in a WinForms application.  I was in search of such a component earlier today and ran across this blog entry, but upon trying to visit the page, my CPU's utilization jumped up to 100% and my browser hung.  After a couple seconds of waiting, I restarted my browser and tried again.  This time I had more patience and, eventually, the page was rendered.

The reason it took so long to grab was because the page was over 3 MBs of HTML, with apparently hundreds of comments, as the little scroll bar was tiny, indicating that the vertical length of the page was huge.  Upon scrolling through the entry, I found that there were about five “real” comments at the top.  The rest - several MBs, I'd imagine - were nothing but comment spam.  Ick.

posted on Thursday, February 17, 2005 2:32 PM

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# re: An Example of the Evilness of Comment Spam 2/18/2005 6:43 AM Soeren Sprogoe

Oh my... The worst thing is that his blog will propably be slash-dot'et when everyone visits it to see how bad it can get.

# re: An Example of the Evilness of Comment Spam 2/18/2005 3:05 PM this.Context

Grrr..... DDoS that Viagra website!

# re: An Example of the Evilness of Comment Spam 3/1/2005 3:54 PM B_Kuz

Okay, i'm thinking ddos isn't stong enough for this situation... i think a PI needs to track down where this guy is and KNEECAP the son-of-a-gun! Don't the search engines have filters that stop this type of spamming anyways?

# re: An Example of the Evilness of Comment Spam 3/3/2005 12:58 PM Ben Strackany

Hey, but isn't getting comment spams like the paparazzi? It means your blog is worth stealing PR from. ;)

Anyhow, I've seen a number of bloggers use CAPTCHA tests to ensure that only real people can add comments. It doesn't stop someone from manually adding "comment spam" to posts, but most of the spammers are using scripts to automatically add some vague comment (+ links to their sites) to a number of higher-PR sites in hopes of boost SE traffic, etc, etc.

I found a free .net CAPTCHA control that I blogged about a little while ago, but I haven't had a need to add it in yet. Most of the captcha tests I've seen are on blogs running on .text -- haven't noticed any for blogger-powered sites.

# re: An Example of the Evilness of Comment Spam 9/28/2005 11:35 PM disha gupta

i would like you to send me those comment spams that you recieved so that i can use these samples to make a comment spam filter that will help you out in not recieveing any more comment spams in near future

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Comment Stats

DayTotal% of Total
Sunday 1866.8%
Monday 37913.9%
Tuesday 45316.7%
Wednesday 50418.5%
Thursday 53519.7%
Friday 49418.2%
Saturday 1666.1%
Total 2717100.0%

Hour1Total% of Total
12:00 AM 652.4%
1:00 AM 682.5%
2:00 AM 622.3%
3:00 AM 742.7%
4:00 AM 572.1%
5:00 AM 1033.8%
6:00 AM 1084.0%
7:00 AM 1585.8%
8:00 AM 1716.3%
9:00 AM 1475.4%
10:00 AM 1716.3%
11:00 AM 1816.7%
12:00 PM 1886.9%
1:00 PM 1696.2%
2:00 PM 1605.9%
3:00 PM 1324.9%
4:00 PM 1073.9%
5:00 PM 923.4%
6:00 PM 913.3%
7:00 PM 963.5%
8:00 PM 833.1%
9:00 PM 782.9%
10:00 PM 792.9%
11:00 PM 772.8%
Total 2717100.0%

Comments by Blog Entry Date/Time

Day Entry MadeAvg.Total
Sunday 5.54144
Monday 5.22339
Tuesday 4.28419
Wednesday 7.67637
Thursday 6.90607
Friday 5.48411
Saturday 5.33160
Total 5.842717

Hour1 Entry MadeAvg.Total
12:00 AM 5.0035
1:00 AM 1.002
5:00 AM 0.000
7:00 AM 7.0035
8:00 AM 5.35107
9:00 AM 6.32278
10:00 AM 6.47246
11:00 AM 4.41181
12:00 PM 6.88330
1:00 PM 3.00111
2:00 PM 5.41222
3:00 PM 8.64285
4:00 PM 4.0589
5:00 PM 5.92154
6:00 PM 4.52113
7:00 PM 9.67174
8:00 PM 9.80147
9:00 PM 5.05111
10:00 PM 5.4265
11:00 PM 4.5732
Total 5.842717

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