I’m a bit torn. I’ve been looking at the pathetic attempts at automated spam in this blog, and my “I like an intellectual / technical challenge” side just wants to write a post detailing what they’re doing wrong and how they could easily make their tools much more effective.
On the other hand… we’re talking about spammers. The scum of the earth. The only creatures in the world that make lawyers and politicians look like decent, lovable human beings. Now, some may argue that what I could suggest in a couple of minutes wouldn’t be exactly rocket science, that they’d surely have thought of it already… but my point is that they haven’t. Both their methods and the comments themselves that they try to post are terrible and ridiculously easy to detect; anyone with half a brain could do a lot better.
In fact, if they’d just… ah, crap. I just can’t. It’d be like handing a loaded gun to a kid. The biggest asshole-ish jerk of a kid, and a brain-damaged, glue-eating one as well, but still, in some ways, a kid. Who could do a lot of damage with it. But, to get some idea, my “brilliant” suggestion for making comment spam tools much more effective — which would not only hugely improve the odds of beating Akismet, but would also be accepted by many less attentive blog owners — would take… a line and a half of text. This is not because I’m some sort of genius… it’s because they’re morons.
Interesting, email spams, while still typically primitive, are actually much more advanced than comment spam tools. There’s actually a bit of thought put into them. Comment spam tools, on the other hand, are the equivalent of a burglar wearing a Beagle Boys-like mask and a stereotypical black and white striped prison suit, and going in broad daylight from house to house, knocking on each door. 🙂