What do the following phrases have in common? (And yes, there is a common link.)
Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed, Thracians red-haired and with blue eyes; so also they conceive the spirits of the gods to be like themselves.
The contents of the world are not just there for the knowing but have to be grasped with suitable mental machinery.
Who can refute a sneer?
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
All of the above phrases have been submitted to my comments on this blog in the past 3 days. In other words, they’re all comment spams.
If you haven’t run into them before, it’s a way of getting traffic to your site by posting bogus comments, all with links back to your site. In these days of search engine rankings based on numbers of links, it also helps to put you higher in search results.
In the spirit of “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” I did a very little bit of digging. I’m not going to tell you the URL that was in the comment spam (because that would give the spammers exactly what they want) but here is a little other information.
The person who spammed me may or may not live on 3 Connell Drive, in Berkeley Heights, NY 07922. His or her phone number may or may not be 190-823-4224. His or her email address may or may not be yukkikunikkennen@yahoo.com. The nameservers that this spammer uses are ESTHOST.COM.
The person is, however, almost certainly a scumbag bottom-feeding creep.
If you would like to let his/her web hosting company know how you feel, please feel free to do so.
Don’t forget that most of the comment spammers out there are just using (or renting) nets of zombie windows boxes that have been 0wn3d and are just waiting to be used for some neferious purpose. Just like most spam you get doesn’t have a correct from address, ditto with spam. Hell, you can’t even (always) blame it by the companies themselves because they’ve contracted someone to do marketting, who hires someone else, who hires someone else, who sets up something based on google rank, etc etc…
It all sucks. Close comments > 30 days old and use mt-blacklist (or equiv) and it goes away for the most part.
However if you do catch anyone, feel free to string them up by their balls and start in with the pliers on them k? 🙂