Chinese Spam - Business Plan or Disgusting Luncheon Meat?

Thursday, August 19, 2010
As you all know, I recently turned on captcha in the comment threads here at Hot Chicks Dig Smart Men. I was getting tired of deleting the Chinese Spammers who were insisting on posting their Chinese character spam in my comments.

And guess what? OF COURSE THAT HASN'T STOPPED THEM.

I continue to get several of these each week, all with Chinese characters and some sort of link that goes Cthulhu-only-knows-where. Which tells me that somebody, somewhere, is trolling the Internet, posting this random spam on miscellaneous blogs. This, of course, is irritating, but hardly earth-shattering.

But it does make me wonder - what kind of business strategy calls for paying someone to perform this "work?" No one who reads HCDSM would click on such a link, and 99.9% of my readers couldn't determine if a Chinese character said "click here for hot sex" or "beef broccoli."

So where's the profit in this "business plan?" I don't get it.

7 comments:

Eric said...

When I was doing a little bit of research on this--Giant Midgets has been having the same problem--it was hypothesized that someone in China is basically using low-paid wageslaves as spambots; an Internet sweatshop, if you will. How this translates into a business plan, I don't know, although it's certainly possible it's some kind of attempt to exploit Google and other search engines in the East: i.e. the links aren't for us, they're to drive search results in China and possibly other Asian countries.

I really don't want to switch to moderation. But I'm seriously considering it. I like the immediacy that occurs when you can post a comment and blam! there it is, and I hate having to wait for comments to appear on moderated sites (for my own and for others--it's irritating when you leave a comment only to discover eight other people could've saved you the trouble). However, it seems that when moderation is implemented, the humans who are paid low wages to type in captchas give up and move on to other sites.

If the spam gets much worse, I may have to bite the bullet.

Steve Buchheit said...

What Eric said. It's called Link Farming. The attempt is to get links back to the client site from as many other websites as possible.

It's why I went back to captchas and limiting comments to only the previous three days (other than that it goes into comment moderation mode). I found they would go back years and comment on posts there. They also figured out a way to block the email notifications being sent, which is why I have the "recent comments" widget on my blog.

Janiece said...

Eric, it's unlikely I'll turn on moderation for any reason, for the reasons you detail. As much as I like DXM, for example, I spend less time there than I would if my comments weren't caught in moderation each and every time.

I don't want to do that to my readers. So I guess I'll continue to break out the Shovel of Doom™ oftener than I'd like.

Juan Federico said...

I think that their embracing of capitalist values with communist zeal is kinda cool. It reminds me a bit of the Ferengi from the Star Trek universe.

mom in northern said...

Chinese Ferengi How cool is that!

Pickle Farmer Eats Bacon said...

I came here by a search link for hot sex with beef broccoli. I'm very disappointed.

Savoly: A broccoli-based lubricant.

Janiece said...

Welcome, Ima. You'll fit right in around here.