What are spam comments?

From Wikipedia:

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

Examples of en.grand-piano.org’s comment spam. Click image to see more examples of the unrelated posts they’ve been commenting on.

If you’re in the market for a new Grand Piano, please take their questionable tactics into consideration before making your final decision. If are willing to use such lowly methods to gain customers, can you really trust the way they handle other aspects of business?

Who engages in this practice, presumable to increase search engine prominence and thus sales?

http://www.en.grand-pianos.org/

I use JS-Kit to handle comments on my blog, and so have disabled Wordpress’ native commenting system. Yet everyday I receive emails informing me that “PianoGuy”, “GoPiano”, “PianoDraft”, “PianoTrade”, “PianoFan”, “LePiano” … found posts as unrelated to Pianos as: “Write Your Own Listener Interface (you know you want to)” or “Auto-Notification of Broken Links, Fantastic Pre-Written Anti-Spam .htaccess File!” (irony?) interesting and helpful.

Right.

Mr. PianoMan, this behaviour is not acceptable. We would like you to please leave our blogs never return. Or if you do insist on reading our posts, at least wait until we write something actually related to Pianos before leaving a advertisment comment.

Thanks.

Update: the spambot has attempted to comment on this post!

What what whaaat?!

Tags: Spam, Stupid

Recently I’ve been learning a bit about .htaccess, redirecting visitors who come via now-broken links.

To help with this, I inserted a little mailer script into my error 404 page that sends me an email containing the referring URI, the URI the visitor was trying to reach and various other tidbits of information. It works well, allowing me to quickly fix broken links that I would otherwise be unaware of.

It also writes the beginning of a rewrite rule, as if I wasn’t lazy enough.

Here it is:

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<? php 
	//mail me about this error...
	$to = "mike(@)pagesofinterest(.)net";
	$base = "http://pagesofinterest.net";
 
	$referrer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
	$requested_page = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
	$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
	$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
	$subject = "Error 404 - $requested_page";
	$body = "The page: $requested_page, referred to by $referrer does not exist.  Fix this or add a rewrite.\n\nAgent: $agent\n\n";
	$body .= "IP: $ip \n\n";
	mail($to, $subject, $body, $headers);
 
	//append to file:
	$redirect = "Redirect 301 $requested_page http://pagesofinterest.net/\n";
	$filename = "redirects.txt";
	$fh = fopen($filename, 'a');
	fwrite($fh, $redirect);
	fclose($fh);
?>

Use:

sort redirects.txt | uniq > unique_redirects.txt

In a terminal to get a smaller file containing only unique broken links.

One problem was the sheer volume of messages I was getting. I did some research, and it seems this site has become the target of spammers. After a bit of googling on how to discourage this, I came across the best thing a newb could hope for: a perfect, commented example. Aaron Logan has graciously made his .htaccess file available to the world. It handles bad user agents, known bad IP’s, and keywords in referrer URI’s. It is gold.

You can get your own copy of it here: best anti spam .htaccess file.

Thanks Aaron!

Tags: .htaccess, Apache, PHP, Spam