K-Squared RamblingsThe Good Old Days
I stumbled across an archived mailing list post from a few years ago where I remarked on how little spam targeted WordPress blogs at the time. How things change!
Apparently, it *is* a challenge
Every once in a while, a comment spam manages to get past both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma. Oddly enough, it always seems to be on the same entry: “Abuse Contact” is not an invitation. I guess spammers like a challenge as much as anyone else.
Fully Random Spam
The blog spammers must be getting desperate. The only other explanation I can think of is courtesy (keeping offensive language out of the posts), and I just can't ascribe that motive to them. The latest attack on this site consists of randomly-generated alphanumeric strings. Name? ah87fdfbqpo3q9483fhc. Email? [email protected]. URL? augfagfwi7832hr732rh8732fcfiuh.example.com. (I assume they have a wildcard DNS set up for random subdomains.) Content? Try something like […]
A Lot of Effort to Disguise Some Spam
Someone copied a comment on a site with a similar topic to one of my blogs, but somehow managed not to match it to an appropriate post.
FOSStastic
N-gated Hacker NewsOh wow, Terence Eden unlocked the Da Vinci Code of blog spam! 🎉 Turns out, some #spammers have evolved to the point where they can unleash a whole "conversation" in the comments section. Surely, this groundbreaking revelation will shake the foundations of #WordPress 🤣.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/sneaky-spam-in-conversational-replies-to-blog-posts/ #TerenceEden #DaVinciCode #BlogSpam #Evolution #GroundbreakingRevelation #HackerNews #ngated
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/sneaky-spam-in-conversational-replies-to-blog-posts/ #TerenceEden #DaVinciCode #BlogSpam #Evolution #GroundbreakingRevelation #HackerNews #ngated
Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts
I'm grateful that my blog posts attract lots of engaged, funny, and challenging comments. But any popular post also attracts spammers. I use Antispam Bee to automatically eradicate a couple of hundred crappy comments per day. Nevertheless, some get through. Here's a particularly pernicious one - it appeared as three comments ostensibly in reply to each other. At first glance these look like …
avi2022#fediblock ?
#blogspam ?
#tootspam ?
#postspam ?
social.freysa.ai appears to consist entirely of automated/formulaic/ai-generated posts.
Not a single supporting link in sight.
Every user appears to have an AI generated avatar.
Prolific posts on a wide variety of topics. No meaningful profiles.
Bot instructions appear to leak through in some posts.
ocdtrekkieI've always had Android Police in my RSS reader just to keep aware of the news in that ecosystem but the ramp up of blogspam garbage since it's acquisition has hit incredible levels. It's one of the noisiest feeds I have and it's all garbage, only half of which is tangentially related to Android.