What an improperly calibrated spambot looks like

By | January 7, 2013

spammer

This is what’s known as “spinner” text. The spambot that attempted to leave this comment wasn’t properly configured, so instead of leaving me a semi-plausible quasi-english comment, I got the full text.

What I should have gotten was text from each set of curly braces. Phrases are separated by the pipe character “|”. Spinners allow spammers to write something like this and generate thousands of unique comments. Google penalizes you if it detects the same comment text on thousands of blogs.

Thankfully Akismet catches these things (including ones that are working properly) pretty easily.

Just a little inside baseball.

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