[Once again, sorry, no politics today.]
Just for giggles, I tried an experiment.
Three days ago I clicked a wrong button on Blogger and disabled comments for two posts. I finally realized my error and it was reconciled. In the process, I tried this experiment:
In the area where I could limit comments, I changed the comments setting from “Registered Users” to “anyone” which would include every person or entity who might be anonymous.
In less than two days, my Blogger Spam locker built up to over 49 comments.
Luckily, Blogger recognized these entries as spam and shunted them aside.
One got through to my standard comments moderation area.
But, in essentially one day, I was (for me, at least!) bombarded with spam comments from who-knows-whom. It was as if I had ladled continual buckets of bloody chum into the waters off New Smyrna Beach, Florida (per International Shark Attack File, it is the shark attack capital of the world).
Question: how do Spammers know this and how do they manage to react so incredibly quickly?
BZ
Bots
If I were to venture a guess, there are computers out there running programs similar to the auto dialers that the phone sales folks use. They keep dialing random numbers until they get a hit, somebody picks up the phone.
I would guess the same can be done with IP address. It finds an opening and then piles the spam in.
One roadblock is those crazy words you type in after posting before it will be sent through.
Good question…I have no idea. But that’s pretty scary how many hits you received.
Yikes!
It’s sorta like Scotty said… but yeah. They already know about your website. They just try to post a comment every few days and if it succeeds then great. If it doesn’t they just move on to the next site in the list.
It takes less than a second for them to test your site for the ability to post so hitting a million websites in a day is no problem and, occasionally, when you open things up they find out pretty quickly.
I suppose that’s why computers are so incredibly efficient. And perhaps spam servers seek out not URLs but the IP addresses of anything and everything.
Another question for readers:
Has anyone gotten cell phone spam yet? I have not on the iPhone, through my amazingly-poor AT&T provider.
BZ