On August 30th, 2008 David Keech (not verified) says:
It may be that the publish rate is not the metric they are using. Maybe 20 minutes on a high profile blog is worth more to them than 10 weeks on a low profile blog.
You would think that this would apply to email spammers as well. Surely it would be worthwhile removing email addresses that bounce or ones that go to low click-rate people such as abuse@example.com and postmaster@example.com. These email addresses are not only likely to not result in any clicks on your spam but they are also likely to submit your spam to a clearing house, submit your IP address to a DNS block list and manually block the email from reaching all of the users of the system they administer.
Interestingly I have also seen spammers repeatedly submitting to the wrong page on my blog but because of the rewrite rules they were still getting an HTTP 200 response. I changed the rules so these guys got a 302 instead and immediately they stopped attempting the spam. I think at least some spammers are looking at the HTTP response code to determine how successful they were at posting their spam. I wonder if a 403 response would send them away, never to come back or if it would just make them try harder to not be detected.
Maybe the spamming bots are written by one group of people and operated by another. The operators may not have the expertise to actually optimise their lists of blogs/emails and the writers don't have any incentive to add this feature to their bots. It would be nice if they did however... then they'd stop spamming my blog after noticing that there hasn't been one successful spam comment in the two years since I allowed comments.
It may be that the publish
It may be that the publish rate is not the metric they are using. Maybe 20 minutes on a high profile blog is worth more to them than 10 weeks on a low profile blog.
You would think that this would apply to email spammers as well. Surely it would be worthwhile removing email addresses that bounce or ones that go to low click-rate people such as abuse@example.com and postmaster@example.com. These email addresses are not only likely to not result in any clicks on your spam but they are also likely to submit your spam to a clearing house, submit your IP address to a DNS block list and manually block the email from reaching all of the users of the system they administer.
Interestingly I have also seen spammers repeatedly submitting to the wrong page on my blog but because of the rewrite rules they were still getting an HTTP 200 response. I changed the rules so these guys got a 302 instead and immediately they stopped attempting the spam. I think at least some spammers are looking at the HTTP response code to determine how successful they were at posting their spam. I wonder if a 403 response would send them away, never to come back or if it would just make them try harder to not be detected.
Maybe the spamming bots are written by one group of people and operated by another. The operators may not have the expertise to actually optimise their lists of blogs/emails and the writers don't have any incentive to add this feature to their bots. It would be nice if they did however... then they'd stop spamming my blog after noticing that there hasn't been one successful spam comment in the two years since I allowed comments.