Someone spamming my review pages, but how and why?

[dickbaker]

I have a couple of hundred pages of products with user reviews. Anyone can fill out the form and review a product.

The form is emailed to me through a CDONTS page so I can review it and delete the review if it's spam or just garbage.

For the last couple of days I've been getting reviews about every half hour or so, and they're weird. The comments are like posts on a forum, with what sounds like back and forth between forum members, except that the topic changes and there's only one side of the "conversation".

I checked IP's, and it looks like whoever is doing it is using proxy servers, as they're coming from all over the world. I thought at first that it was automated, but the comments seem hand-written. Also, the reviews stopped coming in at 12:25 am today (last night) and didn't resume until 5 am, so someone or something took a break for the night.

Could this be automated, or do you think it's someone doing it by hand? Either way, what's the point? If it's something like blog spamming, it's a waste of time, since the reviews are posted by me by hand.

Any ideas what's going on?

Thanks for any replies.

[Marketing Guy]

Perhaps testing out a spambot? Could be scraping posts from forums (specific users, hence the one-sided conversation) and posting it to review sites? With a little effort I guess it wouldn't be that hard to match subject areas to come up with comment spam that might fly under the radar of even eagle-eyed admins.

Come to think of it, I have seen a slight increase in blog comment spam in recent months with comments that seem human written, but just don't fit into the context of the blog post.

[londrum]

a lot of blogs are set up to moderate the first post that someone makes, but after one has been accepted as legit the rest will be let through automatically.

i would guess that its something to do with that. they are submitting a load of normal looking stuff, that will more than likely be waved through without a thought, so they can post their proper spam stuff later.

its highly unlikely that a human is doing it. its more likely a bot. you need to install a captcha, or something like that, to block them

[Rosalind]

Sounds like a bot, and I wouldn't read too much into them taking a break for the night. Somebody probably just turned it off.

[dickbaker]

Thanks for the replies. It seems to have stopped. It would be nice if the same IP's were used should the bot come back so I can stop it.

[funnyman]

Interesting topic, I have one web directory submission site and it's not that much popular yet. But when it become popular then I might get similar spambot or human edited spam messages. I think it takes time to find out the legit one and spam one if the message is hand written. Thanks for sharing your experience. It will help me in near future.