What Kind of Spam is This? Testing Blog Comment Limits

I received this comment on one of my blogs today (on blogger.com):

Easily I agree but I about the post should acquire more info then it has.

It's the third in a series. Before there was:

I will not acquiesce in on it. I over precise post. Expressly the title attracted me to be familiar with the sound story.

and before that

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

It is obviously computer-generated (well, not this last one). The comments are from Anonymous, so they're not trying to legitimate a user on Blogger. Is this a spam attack? What might its goal be? Or are they just testing my blog to see if I reject or not? Does this kind of "attack" have a name?

Dan Rosenstark

Posted 2010-01-21T11:40:00.430

Reputation: 5 718

Are you sure this is all? Maybe the Blogger software removed the links from the text, and did the original post link to other sites? – Arjan – 2010-01-21T11:43:16.740

2Here is today's world: you can't even trust compliments, they're related to spam as well ;) – Gnoupi – 2010-01-21T13:30:44.683

@Gnoupi, I never trust compliments that don't say anything SPECIFIC at all. On my blog, when there have been compliments, they've talked about WHAT they were complimenting. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..." – Dan Rosenstark – 2010-01-21T15:00:33.323

@Arjan van Bentem, yes, you may be right. I'll have to try spamming myself to see what it filters. – Dan Rosenstark – 2010-01-21T15:01:01.480

Answers

I believe the intention is to be whitelisted on the spam list. You could expect to receive spam from the same IP within a few weeks.

I, too, receive spam like this on a regular basis. It is rather frustrating, as it is confusing my Naive Bayes spam classifier: the text of the message itself is not spam.

Paul Lammertsma

Posted 2010-01-21T11:40:00.430

Reputation: 3 508

Ah, that makes sense. @Yar, please keep us posted here! – Arjan – 2010-01-21T12:55:02.613

Cool, thanks for that. @Arjan van Bentem, I will keep you posted, but as I reject those messages, I think they will stop. I've noticed the same thing with my catch-all on my google-apps domains, too. Flurries of activities followed by nothing. – Dan Rosenstark – 2010-01-21T15:02:11.743

My assumption has always been that this checks for the level of moderation in your comments. If you leave a clearly computer-generated post like this online, you're probably not heavily moderating your comments, and a quick Google search would allow the spammer to find you again to post some real spam.

ceejayoz

Posted 2010-01-21T11:40:00.430

Reputation: 2 208

Right, but then: why not just post the real spam in the first place? – Dan Rosenstark – 2010-01-21T15:03:26.047

I receive many similar comments on my blog, is the Site field of comments filled with external sites (of spammers)?

That's probably a way to let some visitors click on their site.

Drake

Posted 2010-01-21T11:40:00.430

Reputation: 5 104

As far as I know, I've left all I know about the comments. But as I said somewhere above, I'll have to try spamming myself to see what hapens. – Dan Rosenstark – 2010-01-21T15:02:54.613

You're not the only one to suffer from this.

Googling for these texts has shown only a few results for the first two.
But the last one shows 115,000 results !!

It might be that the first two were only test-runs leading up to the third.
From the translated ones I would guess that the source is in the far-east, probably China.

harrymc

Posted 2010-01-21T11:40:00.430

Reputation: 306 093

+1 but not for the China part, could be from anyplace non-English. But: I posted them in order from most to least-recent. I think they were trying native, and then less native texts to see how permissive the site is... or something? Anyway, nice going on googling the phrases! – Dan Rosenstark – 2010-01-21T15:05:05.963