Help Me Understand Comment Spam [Uncertain Principles]

So, I get a lot of comment spam here, probably a couple of orders of magnitude more than I get real comments (sigh). The vast majority of this gets blocked by built-in filters, so none of the stuff pitching medically implausible treatments for whatever makes it to a point where I have to see it. There’s one new category of junk comment, though, that slips through the filters and requires human moderation (i.e., I have to approve or reject it), and I find this utterly baffling.

The comments are sorta-kinda relevant to the post that they’re sent to, albeit with dubious English, and they don’t contain any obvious pitch for anything. They also don’t include a URL. What they do have, somewhere, is an eight-or-nine-digit number that looks fairly random. So, for example, a spam comment sent to the recent post about searching for exotic physics might read something like:

I agree that the Standard Model of particle physics is very successful theory, but what other theories might be there to explain unexplained phenomena? I think for example alien abduction and crop circles are very interesting things, but do not know can the Standard Model explain these? i18675309

Sometimes the gibberish string of digits is appended to the name field rather than the text of the post. Geographically, most of these originate in South Africa (to the point where I’m basically just flagging anything from Pretoria as spam), but not always. The email addresses are usually legit-looking gmail accounts; that is, not obviously computer-generated alphanumeric strings, but things that might plausibly relate to an actual human name, but not necessarily the name given in the “Name” field.

I find these very irritating, not just because they make me question everything that comes in with less than perfect English, but because I can’t figure out what the angle is. They’re not selling anything in the text, and they don’t leave a URL so they’re not getting any Google boost from having the comments go through. The entire purpose seems to be to get those strings of numbers into blog comments, and I can’t figure out what the hell those numbers are.

So, does anybody know what the deal is with this? What are those numbers? What is the purpose of trying to get them into my comment section?

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1CMNiEo

So, I get a lot of comment spam here, probably a couple of orders of magnitude more than I get real comments (sigh). The vast majority of this gets blocked by built-in filters, so none of the stuff pitching medically implausible treatments for whatever makes it to a point where I have to see it. There’s one new category of junk comment, though, that slips through the filters and requires human moderation (i.e., I have to approve or reject it), and I find this utterly baffling.

The comments are sorta-kinda relevant to the post that they’re sent to, albeit with dubious English, and they don’t contain any obvious pitch for anything. They also don’t include a URL. What they do have, somewhere, is an eight-or-nine-digit number that looks fairly random. So, for example, a spam comment sent to the recent post about searching for exotic physics might read something like:

I agree that the Standard Model of particle physics is very successful theory, but what other theories might be there to explain unexplained phenomena? I think for example alien abduction and crop circles are very interesting things, but do not know can the Standard Model explain these? i18675309

Sometimes the gibberish string of digits is appended to the name field rather than the text of the post. Geographically, most of these originate in South Africa (to the point where I’m basically just flagging anything from Pretoria as spam), but not always. The email addresses are usually legit-looking gmail accounts; that is, not obviously computer-generated alphanumeric strings, but things that might plausibly relate to an actual human name, but not necessarily the name given in the “Name” field.

I find these very irritating, not just because they make me question everything that comes in with less than perfect English, but because I can’t figure out what the angle is. They’re not selling anything in the text, and they don’t leave a URL so they’re not getting any Google boost from having the comments go through. The entire purpose seems to be to get those strings of numbers into blog comments, and I can’t figure out what the hell those numbers are.

So, does anybody know what the deal is with this? What are those numbers? What is the purpose of trying to get them into my comment section?

from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1CMNiEo