September 25th, 2006

Though I've previously talked about guestbook spammers before in my rants, I normally would not like to devote too much time and attention to them. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: Why should I let them occupy more of my time than necessary?

But guestbook spam has -er- matured since the last time I mentioned it. Spammers no longer pedantically go from guestbook to guestbook "manually" entering their advertising or hyperlinks; they now use scripted tools to do that. Also, the spammers are no longer interested in making their guestbook entries look anything like guestbook entries. Because of the mess they make, and because they are automated, I have had to write my own scripts to test and accept or reject every attempt into my guestbook. And because spammers are automated, I had to automate my guestbook as well (if I get 200 attempts per day, do I really want to waste time reviewing and rejecting all that spam?)

Why spam guestbooks?

First of all, what exactly are these chowderheads' scripts helping them to do?

Mostly, they are trying to leave hyperlinks to their websites in guestbooks everywhere in an effort to convince search engines (such as Google, AltaVista, Ask, and Yahoo!) to rank their websites higher in the results page. You see, the more links from other websites there are to their own websites, the higher Google and other similar search engines will rank their target pages. Then they fill their target pages with links that pay 1/2 a cent or a whole cent per page view, and that forms their "profit-centre". You see, it turns out that spammers couldn't care less whether or not you ever read their guestbook entries at all ... they just want search engine spiders to come and see the links to their websites that they left behind.

(Well, among other things ... but spammers can't directly control what links you click once you are looking at the search results, can they? And they can't make you go to their pages, can they? Hmm ... well, actually, they can ... more about that later.)

Spammers will sometimes employ "tricks" to prevent you from detecting that their entries are spam. To try to convince you that their entries are "legitimate" they might add some general feel-good comments like this:

Very good site design! I like it! Thanks! [insert a bunch of links to drug, gambling, or porno websites]

... or ...

Great website! Check out these others: [insert a bunch of links to drug, gambling, or porno websites]

And they might further try to hide the entries using inline CSS (that is, change the colour and size of the text to try making it unreadable in your browser.

They might try to add strange text and comments culled from other guestbooks ... or they might give up the intelligence-insulting pretence of fake comments and just do their best to fill your guestbook up with as many links to their web pages that their scripts and your guestbook scripts are capable of.

How to refer to spammers in polite company

All of this, by the way, falls under the category of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)... more specifically Black Hat Search Engine Optimization. "Black Hat" signifies that they are the bad guys 'cause they wear black hats. And people who strive to improve their websites' placements in search engines by employing "legal" and "acceptable" techniques, such as legitimate submissions and metadata are the good guys and thus perform "White Hat Search Engine Optimization". This terminology strikes me as a bit silly, by the way, but it helps me when I see something written like, "Black Hat SEO Boris Yeltsin did this and that today."

Hijacking your website

As I mentioned earlier, there are other nasty things that guestbook spammers are trying to do to improve the placement in search engines: One of them is to embed chunks of script—that's executable code—into the guestbook entries themselves. So instead of just showing you some text or hosting some links, your guestbook will also tell your browser to stop looking at it, and instead jump to the spammer's page! In effect, the spammer has just hijacked your guestbook; everyone who tries to look at your guestbook will instead end up looking at the spammer's web page at some completely different website.

And spammers have also started hacking into website administration settings to tell search engine spiders to stop looking at your pages, and instead go crawl around on the spammers' pages. That means that as your web pages change, the search engines won't know about those changes. If your site is new, the search engines will never even know about the content, because the spiders will get redirected immediately before looking at any of it.

Who are they?

Well, let's not beat about the bush. Spammer may think they are great guys and wonderful humanitarians, but they are, basically, the same type of people as crooks. They always defend themselves with the same sort of wide-eyed pretend-innocence as people who perpetrate break-ins and armed robberies. They think they are all right and are just doing something that is legal and fair. Some express the opinion that they are performing a public service (I kid you not) by exposing "weaknesses" in the system. But all their arguments and expressions of indignation are just smoke to hide the fact they have criminal minds ... and cowardly ones, too, since they haven't got the courage to perform physical crimes; they rely on the partial anonymity of the Internet.

And spammers are, by and large, have-nots. What I mean by that is that a lot of spammers come from China, Russia, and other "poor" but fully technologically-advanced countries. They look at "The West" as being rich and bright and full of money that is really just a lot of ripe fruit waiting for them to pick and enjoy themselves. They think "The West" is full of fat stupid people who practically deserve to be cheated and fooled. And spammers won't stop or respond favourably to pleading from anyone (or reason: spamming is not a lucrative business, despite their lies to the contrary) because they have such contempt for us in the West.

So what to do?

Well, appealing to the governments of "spamming countries" is not going to do any good. Even when they are open to hearing the trouble of such Internet crimes as spam and Black Hat SEO, the law-makers could not possibly move fast enough to enact laws at the same speed as the methods of subverting the Internet software technology. Even before laws come to pass, there are new methods being employed by spammers to muddy the waters further.

Perhaps the only way is to somehow show the spammers that there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Distributing spam doesn't make enough money to justify the efforts, but that can be said of slot machines and horse-racing, too ... and I don't see either of those pursuits ending any time soon.

I wish there were more that could be done to stop spammers from making a disastrous mess of the Internet landscape (type "Phentermine" in Google and click a link or two to see what I mean) but it looks like trying to enact laws more quickly and internationally is the only "solution" available right now.

In the meantime, people like me who maintain websites have to keep sharpening our coding skills to constantly improve our methods of catching the spam that is getting more difficult with each month to catch. Right now my scripts catch nearly all of it, but every time webmasters build better mousetraps, they are also building better mice. If I don't keep adapting to spammers' new methods, I will eventually have guestbooks full of spam.

One wonders where it will end.

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