Augmented Speakers’ Corner Infiltrated by Spammers!!

In a sign that this website was in neglect, ASC had a handful of new user accounts created over the past 15 hours who then most ungracefully proceeded to flood the front page with all manner of pornography. While free speech is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, I still feel it is my responsibility to apologize, in the event anyone had subscribed to this sites’ RSS feed and received the unwanted content. Sorry, I will be more vigilant in future.

I think this is how it works: programs sniff out blogs that allow users to create new accounts with automatic posting privileges to the front page (up to today, this was how ASC was setup). They do this by creating gibberish user names, pushing gibberish URLs and email addresses in the comment spam. This had puzzled me in the past - why would a spammer take the time to spam gibberish? You’d think at least Viagra or penis enlargement would be among the links in the comment spam. But these posts are “hello world” posts - designed just to see if the bot succeeded in creating an account with authoring privileges. Once the spammers realize they have found a host blog that they can publish from, they then use the accounts to post to the site- in this case, interracial porn.

A note to the spammer - would you care to comment on whether the above analysis is correct? I’d like to know whether I got it more or less right.