

Ask HN: "I'm impressed"-style comment spam - pathdependent

I get a lot of sign ups on a drupal site I manage that contain the following:<p><pre><code>  I am impressed, I have to say. Really rarely do I see a blog thats both informative and entertaining, and let me tell you, you have hit the nail on the head....
</code></pre>
The bot seems reasonably sophisticated -- it's capable of scraping arbitrarily defined fields and filling them with junk (or that comment), and it follows signup verification links; however, it doesn't seem to submit any false articles, share any URLs, and the email address often dies quickly.<p>What is the point of this type of bot? Is it scraping walled data? It seems innocuous -- a minor nuisance at most -- but I doubt that is the case.
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nl
Many sites have a comment approval policy that only hold the first comment by
a user for approval. Once that user has had one comment approved manually,
future comments will be automatically approved.

Spambots attempt to exploit this by creating likely-sounding content for a
first comment, getting it approved and then spamming.

~~~
rhizome
Yeah, I'd call it "ingratiation," submitting comments just generic enough to
pass muster. I also think it's a Mechanical Turk type thing, where the
comments can just be pasted in reply to almost any blog post. "Yeah dude,
you're the king!" Regardless of "rel=nofollow," there will be an URL to Ugg
boots or NFL Jerseys or whatever.

