Spammy spam and the spammers who send it

I’m really happy that the portable contacts specification exists, and that products like Gmail enable an OAuth connection for the “find your friends already in the network” situation.

However, this has enabled a particularly bad form of spammy spam that I encountered again this week from Shoppybag.com. It starts with a message like this one:

ShoppyBag Spam

It comes from someone you know, claims that person has “tagged you” in a photo, and asks you to sign up to come see it.

Read more…

Inbound Marketing, Outbound Marketing, and Spam: #IMS09 day one

Yesterday was day one for the Inbound Marketing Summit (see #ims09 for tweetstream) at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. If you’ll allow me an early morning extended metaphor, it reminded me an aspect of Boston public transit: the distinction between inbound and outbound, and how they can get confused.

Read more…

SlideShare is now social (it has spam)

One of my favorite definitions of “social computing” is Clay Shirky’s quip:

Social software is stuff that gets spammed

Well if that’s the case, now even share-my-powerpoints site SlideShare (follow me there) is officially social.

Here’s an email I got yesterday via SlideShare:

Hi jeckman,

jane209 sent you a private message on SlideShare.

******
hi I am jane,single girl looking for honest and nice person, whom I can partner with.I don’t care about your color or ethnicity.I’m sending you this beautiful mail,with a wish for much happiness. I am looking forward to hear from you. Write me on (janegab42@yahoo.com)God bless. thanks jane
******

You can reply to jane209′s message by clicking here.

Now, as much as I like the sentiment that Jane209 is looking for someone with whom she can “partner,” that she doesn’t care about my color or ethnicity, and that she wishes me much happiness, I’m going to have to go with the “report as spam” link on that one.

Comment Fail

If you’ve tried to leave comments here recently, bless you, and I’m sorry.

First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem.

Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right.

A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

Or, rather, they were perfectly solvable, and I solved them – as I’m sure Luis had. But Mollom refuses to recognize my solutions. Maybe I really am a computer, and thus fail the Captcha.

Anyway, the point is, I’m not trying to make it difficult to comment on this blog, just trying to deal with spam. I’ve turned Mollom off again, and won’t re-enable it until I try it myself and see that it works.

Mollom anti-spam

I’ve enabled Mollom-based anti-spam to this blog – please let me know if this causes any unexpected difficulty or errors.

Mollom will ask “suspicious” commenters to solve a CAPTCHA before allowing their comments to post.

If this proves too onerous I will go back to just using Askimet but I wanted to try it out.

Thanks to Dries, Benjamin, et al for running Mollom and to Matthias Vandermaesen for maintaining the WP-Mollom plugin.