I can't decide if United Airlines is just promoting the Mile High Club on its twitter page, or if it's just an ordinary spammer hijacking their account:
(and no, you shouldn't actually enter that URL into your browser. It's boring spammy stuff.)
via @cbarrett and countless others on twitter.
[caption id="attachment_2563" align="alignright" width="150" caption="CC by-sa licensed by twicepics on flickr"]
[/caption]Over the recent weeks I've got frequent blog spam along the lines of:
Hi. I just noticed that your site looks like it has a few code problems at the very bottom of your site's page. I'm not sure if everybody is getting this same problem when browsing your blog? I am employing a totally different browser than most people, referred to as Opera, so that is what might be causing it? I just wanted to make sure you know. Thanks for posting some great postings and I'll try to return back with a completely different browser to check things out!
(emphasis: mine)
Not only does my blog display just fine in Opera (yes, I checked), I get even more bogus comments at times claiming that my blog looks horrible in Firefox, of all browsers. Dear spammers, now you're just making fools of yourselves.
The main thing identifying this kind of comment as spam (other than the bogus claim that my blog doesn't render correctly in non-Internet-Explorer browsers) is the URL these comments come with. Usually, they promise a "free" iPod, MacBook, car, house, airplane or ride to the moon (exaggeration: mine).
I wonder how many bloggers actually publish these, thinking it's well-meant advice. :(
Photo credit: "Spam" CC by-sa licensed by twicepics on flickr
It seems to me like some people have a little too much time at their hands: I recently notice a bunch of hand-crafted spam coming in to my blog, mainly as comments to the famous (infamous?) cake article.
The comments look something like this:
Some hand-crafted wordpress spam, notice how the comment makes sense but the supplied URL is quite apparently promoting spam content.
Interestingly, most of these comments actually link to pages that promote some sort of shady pyramid scheme. Looks like these people desperately surf the web searching for well-visited blog posts and drop spam in there -- by hand.
Yet, even if they manage to get through comment moderation, they are not likely to squeeze any "search engine juice" out of it, since Wordpress marks commenters' homepage links as nofollow by default.
And though I would like to tell them they can save their keystrokes and that they are wasting their time (and, more importantly, mine too), I can probably drop that, since chances are, none of these people will ever actually read the blogs they are spamming...
