I get a moderate amount of comment spam here on the blog. Fortunately, WordPress lets me moderate comments before they’re posted, and it’s pretty easy to separate the signal from the noise. Most of the comment spam is pointers to pharmacy web sites or links to porn sites. Some, though, are really random. Like the one I got today: “Sorry, but what is kimerikas? Jane.” That was the entire comment. Always willing to learn something new, I searched Google for “kimerikas,” and got about 900 hits. I didn’t look at all of the hits, but the few pages I did look at all contained identical comments. If anybody knows what kimerikas is, please let me know.
Another comment spam I got recently was for a piece of software that will post trackbacks to multiple blogs. Yes, you got that right: spam offering a spam generator.
It continues to amaze me that spam in all forms is still prevalent. Is there any research to indicate that spam is profitable? I’m sure it’s profitable for the big outfits that send spam on behalf of other people (i.e. they get paid to flood my email with trash), but do the people who pay these outfits actually see a return on their spam investments? With most major mail servers’ frontline filters throwing out the vast majority of spam, and the few stragglers being easy to identify and delete manually, how can anybody make money trying to advertise this way?
I found your page looking for kimerikas (talk about getting indexed fast on Google!) because it also appeared on my guestbook today.
I’ve noticed a lot of spam contains keywords or identifiers of some sort or other. I think they use it to check later via search engines as to which comments “stick.” Then they can go back and add the site to their database of spammable sites.
I’m sure spam is profitable because it virtually costs $0 to send. So even if one person in one hundred thousand responds, it’s still an economically viable thing to do.
I got the same “Sorry, but what is kimerikas? Jane.” spam on my blog. 90+% is caught by the filter, but this one got though. Like you, I googled for “kimerikas”, your blog came up near the top, an on a fluke decided to come here because I could see that you were talking about the issue of spam.
I haven’t seen any research but apparently spam works because otherwise they wouldn’t do it. It’s kind of like the 6:30 PM telemarketing call. Everyone says they hate it but someone somewhere must be buying from them.
As for the “Sorry, but what is kimerikas?” spam, the one on my site also had a URl with it,
http://Hello
Curious, I went to the site (like you I usually just delete the comment and am done with it) It turns out to be some photobucket-type site. Did you not get that URL on yours?
I am Kimerikas. Who is looking for me?
(same crap in my guest book)