Do people like that even think that they're going to manage to get even the slightest increase in income due to that sort of behavior?

I was getting them from 61.181.5.118 and 61.181.5.155; I blocked off the whole /24 as a result. You may have to do the same...

To answer fluffy's question: Yes. The point is to get more _links_ to a website, which increases its pagerank and makes it appear earlier (preferably on the first page) in a Google search.

I'd noticed those comments and suspected that it was only going to be a short amount of time before you realized it and took action and blogged about it in disgust. It was sort of liking waiting for a pressure cooker to whistle! :-)

What MT needs is a "bot free" interface for comments. One of those "enter the letters and numbers in the box to the left here" things that paypal and vB use.

.. Then they'll sod off and prey on trackback and wiki .. *sigh*

hm, I guess that would put a stop to it.. but it inconveniences real users and I don't like that..

I'd rather script some sort of checking mechanism.

There's a thread going on at the Kalsey Consulting blog about this (http://kalsey.com/2003/09/comment_spam/). Some of the same points are made there about the problems with "Turing-test" systems.

It definitely looks like blog comments are the next target for spammers.

How about you just publish a list of the IPs in a hall of shame?...:-)

I'm starting to think that blog comments should not allow links. URLs yes, but not producing the actual a href tags, even for the 'Posted by' sections. A few comments in popular blogs is enough to make you shoot up the rankings in Google...

... a bit like this comment really.
I found myself now 'owning' my surname in Google, definitely due to comments in blogs. Cool to start with, but not from an information retrieval point of view.

On 2. September I got the spam from 61.181.5.40, which seems to be located in TianJin, a city in China. You can check this with the Geobytes IPLocator at http://www.geobytes.com/iplocator.htm. Kasias Spam IP shows the same result. Checking the promoted viagra/porn links in my blog showed up with some whois entries related to TianJin too:
------------ whois excerpt -------------
No.5 DongJianLi,XiChangXiaPo,TianTai Lu,HeBei Qu
TianJin, TianJin 300230
----------------------------------------

The best of all. The spam-entry was placed as a comment on my entry about guestbook spamming (sorry, the entry is in german, but the image says a lot. it shows a guestbook entry with 1454 links on a very small area). http://www.gerald-steffens.com/blog/archives/00000037.htm
What sense!

I banned 61.181.5, but is it enough?

i just ran across this as well. on my todo list is to start writing scripts to get the ip addresses of the net anti-social (email spammers, people who ignore my robots.txt file, blog comment spammers) and start feeding it to a script that filters them on an ip level. i'm connected to the net via a cisco router so i'll probably write a backend to have it filter, but i might also do one for linux iptables. depending on the source of the entry i'll have the block expire after a certain number of days and have info about the address stored in a db for future use.

regardless i have the same question - what makes these people think any of these methods impress people?

I think that the spam-problem goes bigger because google ignores the guestbook entries since sep.03 and the spammers have to search new targets to place their spam. Many people comes with dynamic ip and so the ip blocking will not work.

I banned 61.181.*.*. on my blog Friday. They were regularly spamming comments, although it wasn't for porn. Anyhow, everything from 61.181.0.0 - 61.181.255.255 is taken by the same company. They're history on my blog.

Persistent little freaks, aren't they?

There's a certain irony to that last comment. :P

I am getting a ton of spam on my blog. Blocking I.P.'s but I am not keeping up. They must have some sort of bot that is doing it.

MT-Blacklist works great for fighting blog spam. I have created a Blog Spam Database where bloggers can submit and share spam domains, phrases, and IP addresses. The database can output text files that can be used with MT-Blacklist. If we all work together we can make it really difficult for the spammers. The Blog Spam Database can be found at http://www.markcarey.com/spamdb/