I've posted several threads about spam and spammers. For some reason, the subject fascinates me. I just want to pass on something I found and see if anyone wants to comment on it.

There is an old computer game called frontier. I happened to find a guy with a website about the game. Apparently, the site was created around November, 2000. His website has one of those guestbook things and the guestbook currently has 42 pages of comments.

(still with me?)
Page 1 has the newest comments and page 42 has the oldest.
From page 1 to page 27, it's *all* spammers. The first spammer to post on the site posted on 04/18/2006.

So, for six years this guestbook sat there and people occasionally posted. In six years, they managed to fill 15 pages with comments.

About 1 year ago, someone somewhere invented forum spamming. In less than one year, spammers filled 27 pages with spam.

Also of note (although I didn't look at all 27 pages of spam) it appears that nobody wants to post in his guestbook anymore. It's a spam wasteland.

Here's why spam fascinates me: I wonder who are these people? Where did they grow up? What happened to them to make them want to do this - to abuse the commons?

Here is the guestbook if anybody cares:
http://htmlgear.tripod.com/guest/con...t?u=jffesguest

I have a rather large site for a computer game. Until recently I had a guest book and would get comments about once every 3 to 4 weeks. Then some poker spambot found me an posted what it thought was a link in broken HTML code on the thing every three days. I finally just took the guestbook part off the site.

According to the counter, my site gets between 10 and 30 hits per day, so it's probably safe to say that no one but me saw the sapm. Time well spent.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Who knows, with the spread of technology, it could be anyone from a bored Nigerian in an internet cafe to a pennies a day wageslave in some Asian outfit.

There are American and Euro spammers to be sure (most of their stuff seems to be stock tips these days), but most of the sales pitches I see carry the distinct stink of the Second World. Cheap knock offs or stolen property from outsourced manufacturing facilities supply them with their garbage, then they just throw advertising anywhere they can slap a message in the hopes someone buys. And these are the guys actually trying to engage in something resembling commerce before you ever touch the ones just trying to shmooze you out of money.

Most of the spam in forums, guestbooks, ect come from scripted bots. Very little of it is manual. And there's many, many reasons for doing so. The primary reason spammers do what they do is of course, profit. Second: If a website is spammed on enough boards with the correct keywords, they can actually shove thier website higher up on the list for certain search bots like google 'n yahoo.
There are services out there you can buy that do this spamming for you and guarentee to get you to the top of a search engine list.

yes that's correct.

This guestbook was out there for a long time but it didn't get any spam until last year. Certainly, the spambots can easily find this guestbook. So, does that mean that they were only invented a year ago?

I've had a couple of attempts at spam in the comments section of my journal, but since I have it set so that I approve all comments, it doesn't get through. (I've only deleted one comment that wasn't spam, and it used language I didn't approve of.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Swahili?

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

As a DIY web marketer, I know about spam and different tactic webmasters will do to make themselves popular.

These guys aren't looking to get visitors to their sites from their spam, but mainly to get a higher ranking on Google through the link. One of the factors Google uses in ranking sites for a particular search term is how many links exist to that site on other sites and also the quality of the sites linking to the site. By generating thousands of links in forums and guest books, spammers can get better placement on Google and get more traffic as a result.

Spammers can make millions. They're everyday Joes who have found a way to exploit the Internet and make a buck. They also come from all countries.

Lately, more spam has been coming out of lesser developed countries, and as countries like China, Russia, and India grow in Internet usage, expect to see more of it.

See, I actually own a Swahili dictionary.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"