Pligg Comment Spam

Introduction

An unfortunate consequence of posting stuff online is that you enable your ‘work’, ‘your words of wisdom’, your ‘copyright’ or your petty scrawlings (choose which you think is the most appropriate), to the world as as such, it’s freely copyable.

My website is proudly running on WordPress sat on a standard shared hosting LAMP installation.  Millions do likewise as it’s cheap and effective and has an inbuilt SEO optimisation function that if you don’t abuse it, it actually works!

Comment spam is a pain but the various plugins and lockdowns block most of the crap.

Except last night I had two weird ones within half-an-hour of each other, that came from Pligg websites.  I’d never heard of Pligg until then, but it’s another example of CMS software.

The way that the comment spam made it as far as my filters (as most is dumped without my intervention) is that the websites seemed to do everything correctly to get proper pingbacks – except make sense!!!

Green Tea Fat Burner – Greenteafatburner.info

This one appeared against the posting  watch-out-for-the-scam-double-bluff, which is highly ironic!  It’s WHOIS entry is ‘protected’ by WhoisGuard – which is to be expected.  It came from IP 67.214.185.157

Weak Bladder Info – Weakbladder.info

This one appeared against the posting  rapidshare-wordpress-comment-spam, which is even more ironic, if anything!  It’s WHOIS entry is ‘protected’ by WhoisGuard – again to be expected.  It came from IP 209.31.180.25

Details

Both sites strip out text from websites (like mine), turn the text into postings and even apply ‘votes’ to them.  Sometimes after 3 mins!  The formulaic nature of the design is revealed by the ‘What is the ****** site all about?’ blurb down the side.    This is one, the other is almost identical.

The Weak Bladder site is a place for out community members to add resources and information that are related to Weak Bladder into one spot. We collect all of the relevent information from around the web, post it here, in the hopes that having a single resource will all us, and you, to save time when researching this topic. If you’d like to help, then register for a free membership and start contributing as an active community member.

Go for it! (not)

Postscript – later today!

Yay!  Got another.  Same blurb etc IP 76.73.41.92  This time it’s jointpainreliefs.info, and I quote;

The Joint Pain Relief site is a place where we collect information about joint pain, and how to overcome it, in one spot. We are a community dedicated to bringing you the best resources from around the web. If you’d like to join our community and help, signup! It’s free…

Perhaps I didn’t make it clear before, but the ‘joint pain reliefs’ contains everything…except…joint pain reliefs!  It appeared on my highly related (not) post Rapidshare WordPress Comment Spam.   What is it about this post that attracts the comment spammers?  Surely they’re not going for the phrase ‘Comment Spam’?.  And don’t call me surely!

Post-Postscript 9 June 2009

I’ve got another two almost identical comment spam/content scraping hits against the same post Rapidshare WordPress Comment Spam!!!  What is their game…

So I’m going to make a little list of them now.  Also, I’m starting a competition to guess the next bizarre subject matter of the Pligg based website.  My guess is eyelashmiteproblem.info, but I could be wrong …  It could be itchyarse.info or something.  It won’t be from these IP addresses though as I’ve blocked them.

So far, I have:

I think it’s time I started adding a few blocks to my .htaccess file, ha ha. If you don’t know how to do this, read here.

Post-PostScript 14 June 2009

The next entry in the Pligg wall of shame came this morning from:

OnlyOutdoorRugs.info at IP 204.124.181.57   This is a US based host.  It targetted this wholly unrelated post of mine, Chatelus Malvaleix on Google Earth Tour de France Map

I’m now left wondering what to do with an Outdoor Rugs, especially when it rains!  The world has gone mad.  Rugs for outside has to be the height of decadence – unless they are normal rugs that you take outside to sit on. But then they’d be indoor rugs. So outdoor rugs must be for dry countries where it never rains.  My brain hurts.