comment spam with random characters?

colm_c

On one of the websites which we run, there is a custom commenting engine, so people can leave comments about articles etc.

We get some spam, but most of it is taken care of by the word blacklist, however recently we've been getting nonsenscial spam with links to sites that don't even exist like:

566157fc http://86055142.com <a href='http://6f3e6e44.com'>a4f4a148</a> [url]http://8d963db1.com[/url] [url=http://ab2228df.com]dfec6a80[/url]

I understand that most comment spam is an attempt to get a better page rank - but why would someone try to enter spam like the above?

It's not really a problem since there is a high rate of moderation but just for curiousity.

Any thoughts?

bpmurray

My guess is that these are non-ASCII data. If this is the case, it would depend on how your app interprets such characters.

jmcc

colm_c wrote:

We get some spam, but most of it is taken care of by the word blacklist, however recently we've been getting nonsenscial spam with links to sites that don't even exist like:

Looks like the IP of the spammer's site expressed as a decimal or hexadecimal value is what is the content of the spam. Spammer scum have been using this kind of thing in spam e-mails for years.

Regards...jmcc

colm_c

But what's the point of the spam - surely the point of comment spam is for someone to link to some website or other - but these urls / domains don't exist.

What could they possibly be getting from this?

As someone once said - all spammers should be used for lab experiments.