When spamming gets silly

Been a few blogspam runs against this site - had 73 the other day. The interesting thing is that a lot of it is gibberish built around links to bona-fide sites.

I guess the two options are:

1. It’s an attempt to see which blogs will publish blogspam spam, with results being tracked;
2. Script kiddies are doing blogspam for fun.

Suspect it’s more of the first than second…

In an AdSense “spamming” issue, while looking for suitable domain names for some new forums, I stumbled into something interesting.

Someone had scraped nearly 2 million usenet posts - all roughly based around finance boards - and republished them in a vbulletin 3.

And the forum linked to other sites which were doing the same on other topics.

I have to admit, my first thought was that this was a huge and unacceptable breach of copyright - enough to almost want me to do a “Cutlet” and let Google chase it up.

However, exploring the actual scraped content showed it was a forum mostly filled with usenet spam - almost all ads with little actual unique content.

That made me smile - the fact that someone had gone to all that effort - but simply ended up with a site filled with complete junk.

It was tempting to simply join the site and do a forum spamming running for some of my own sites on it. I decided against it, in case that simply highlighted my own sites as targets for scraping.

Still, I’m sure the AdSense team will get their share in the end.