I've been getting several comments on ancient posts for the last few days along these lines:

Ive pretty much been doing nothing to speak of. My lifes been bland these days. I havent been up to much. I feel like a void.

They're all variations on the same theme, and they're spam in the sense that they have nothing to do with the post subject, but they don't have a URL they're advertising, so I can't blacklist them. Each one has a different IP address. All I can do is delete them individually, and shrug. If I got flooded with them, it would be a royal PITA to deal with. Does anyone have any theories as to the purpose of these? Are they just testing to see how spammable I am before actually hitting me with a payload?

[Update late Monday morning]

Maybe it was test runs. I just got this one, with a blacklistable URL this time:

I haven\'t gotten anything done for a while, but whatever. I can\'t be bothered with anything , but what can I say? Maybe tomorrow. More or less nothing seems worth doing. Thanks for shared info!

The only thing is that this time it was a ping, rather than a comment.

Ive pretty much been doing nothing to speak of. My lifes been bland these days. I havent been up to much. I feel like a void.

That's pretty funny, but if it's him, this is the first time that he did it nonanonymously.

Nihilists laying the groundwork for anarchists?

That's hilarious.

You know, he did invent the internet, so he's probably very good at rapidly inserting comments with different IP addresses. At least it gives him something harmless to do unlike, say, running the country.

-S

I can only understand this if it had an IP address or something in the email part fo the post to pump up someones google ranking.

Otherwise perhaps a spammer is showing off his abilities to potential customers.

I deleted something very similar to that a while back. I also have a blog with very few comments except for 2 advertisements on the same post which suggest to me someone is providing an automated service?

I've noticed that a lot of my email spam is missing any "payload", and often the form fields are left unfilled or with their defaults exposed. So don't discount that it wasn't just some incompetent spammer using a tool they haven't figured out.

So don't discount that it wasn't just some incompetent spammer using a tool they haven't figured out.

That raises the question, where do the spammers get these tools, and how do they market their services? I've done searches in the past for web sites where they might talk about these things, and always come up empty.

If the threads are pretty old, I suggest you simply close the old ones out so you have less to manage.

Yeah, those are marker posts. If the spammer googles a week later and sees that of the 138 he sent you, 138 are posted, you are targeted for spam with real URLs and such. (It's why the term /furir/i is banned on my blog comments, for example.) The more sophisticated variant is along the lines of: "Can you believe my friend just paid $X for a car? Isn't that crazy?" The X varies, of course, with the technique or ip used to plant the marker, and again Google conveniently provides the spammers with their research results a week later at most.

At mu.nu we are blessed with aggressive spam protection, but once in a while a batch get thru. Last two times, they were meaningless comments with URLs which did not deserve to be added to the blacklist - .edu stuff and search engines.

The solution is to included a char recog fooling distorted number or letter set jpg which the true poster has to reproduce in order to make a comment. They have one on Samizdata.net already.