American in Spain

Spammers can be really clever sometimes. Apparently there is some way to game the Facebook “Like” button such that any click on a webpage can be sent to Facebook as if you had clicked the “Like” button. So what people do is they bait you with a juicy looking webpage, and then once on the page, when you click to view a video, or sometimes they pop up a dialog saying “To verify that you are human, click here!”, and that click gets registered as you “liking” that webpage. With the change last week where there is now no longer much difference between “liking” and “sharing” in how a web page shows up on your Facebook wall, this technique is gaining even more steam. From what I can tell, they aren’t doing anything particularly malicious other than tricking people into posting salacious looking crap to their wall.
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I’ve noticed a new kind of spam getting through my blog’s spam filters lately. I’ve dubbed it “praise spam”. You see, whenever you leave a comment, you can optionally leave the URL to your website. This serves several purposes. Sometimes, as I’m reading a discussion on a blog, one commenter will strike me as particularly funny or insightful, and it’s nice to be able to click a link to go see their blog and read more about that person. It is also provides a benefit to commenting, an external link back to your website, thus motivating someone that wouldn’t comment to enter in the discussion.
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