These people really did go to far too much work...

[jducoeur]

Digging through the Rolls logs, I find that the spammers went to some real effort. They bothered to put real data into many of the fields -- they hooked the name fields up to name generators, location fields up to location generators, the whole nine yards. They even generated fake email addresses for the email fields. Clearly, they thought that there were automated mechanisms here doing data validation on the fields. And all completely to no avail: I still think the entire exercise was pointless, and the spam entries just look different from real ones, so it doesn't actually slow me down in deleting them.

(Although I'm not quite sure what they were thinking when they kept putting "square coffee table" into the Interests field...)

Comments

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

Not all of them -- the Open Guide to Boston has only suffered from one spammer, and he didn't even bother to create text, he just put a 0-height div with a couple thousand links in it (along with a comment: "Excuse me for this, my children need food to eat, please forgive me.")

I think this is a factor of the fact that the Open Guide is still relatively small (though growing an average of 200 visits/week), but other smaller/less popular Open Guides have gotten much more spam, so some of it may be the fact that I have been very good at making sure any spam that does get through goes away almost instantly.

Just some thoughts.

[jducoeur]

It's a combination of factors, to be sure. The size is certainly an advantage -- it can simply take a long time for the spammers to notice you. Indeed, one thing I've found in my logs is that the spam ramped up quite gradually but steadily, from just a trickle at the beginning to a flood recently; my guess is that there's an underground publicity network where they talk about sites that are working well for them. (Based on the fact that, by the end, there are clearly at least five or six different attackers.)

But yes: if you kill the spam very persistently, I'm sure it makes you a less appealing target. They prefer easier targets that don't fight back...