Clever blogspammer
A spammer posted the following comment on my old blog post Chrome URLs in Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird yesterday:
I've been a long time user of both IE and Netscape. Now I'm using Mozilla and Firebird. Although I'm a fan of Mozilla and Firebird and have recommended it to friends.
The poster's URL had a spammy-looking domain name ("success-biz-replica"), but the site itself didn't look too spammy and the comment seemed fairly on-topic, so I didn't delete the comment. But today I stumbled on a very similar comment here and realized the comments were spam. The spammer probably decided to spam blogs mentioning Mozilla because those blogs are likely to have high Google PageRank.
I went into my web server logs to see what search phrase she used. I figured it would be something like mozilla "post a comment" "remember personal info" but I wanted to see the exact search phrase. I searched for the poster's IP address and found this:
193.230.197.6 - - [26/Oct/2003:11:07:05 -0800] "GET /archives/000007.html HTTP/1.0" 200 12252 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Alexa Toolbar)"
There was no referer, which probably just means she hid the referer intentionally. But I noticed something else: she used Internet Explorer to post the comment.
I deleted the comment.
October 28th, 2003 at 7:31 am
Hmm… I got that as well on my post on the XUL “Periodic Table”. Thought it was weird because it didn’t seem to have a relevance to my entry beyond the Mozilla connection.
Anyway, I’ve deleted it and also added it to my blacklist (using MT-Blacklist – it’s good stuff when you get comment spammed a lot).
The comment:
“Now I’m using Mozilla and Firebird. Although I’m a fan of Mozilla and Firebird and have recommended it to friends. Frieda from Lucerna, Switzerland [URL to success-biz-replica]”
October 28th, 2003 at 7:37 am
I got it as well. Hmm.. exact same wording too… :-(
October 28th, 2003 at 4:24 pm
You’d think they’d have a robot that does it. Why do they think we want to visit their sites?
October 28th, 2003 at 10:24 pm
They don’t think we want to visit their sites. They know we have PageRank, and that’s what they want.
October 29th, 2003 at 3:02 pm
I got that comment as well, on “Death of Netscape”. The same guy happened to post on a whole deluge of other entries with only one comment appearing to be off-topic. I was suspicious because I didn’t think my blog was that interesting for a random person to be wandering about in and looked it up on Google =p I’ll definitely be checking out MT-Blacklist.
December 1st, 2003 at 8:22 am
I’ve seen alot of this too.
December 26th, 2003 at 9:57 am
mozilla rules indeed :)