New spammer.

[icarus]

A sockpuppet account is spamming my old Fanlib posts. Again. These appear to be all the same person:

harrisybanes
lannateffetell
craigtaube
terrellhellums
howardclancy
mariahkopp
weldonarnett

If you'd like to ban them too, go to: http://www.livejournal.com/admin/console/

Type: ban_set [insert User Name here]

Comments

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

The spammers seem to be out in force tonight. I've had three different ones (neither of the two you list) respond to ancient comments of mine on other people's posts.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

You, too?

If it's convenient, let me know their names, and I'll ban them as well.

What do they get out of this? I have a hard enough time just keeping up with my f-list and responding to comments from friends. I can't imagine why anyone would create extra work for themselves.

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

craigtaube
terrellhellums
howardclancy

Yeah, I have no idea. They all said stuff that was vaguely tailored to the content of the posts/comments, too, so it must have taken some work, not just a random c&p job.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ah, the same thing then. Might even be the same person.

In this case for example, a comment on a post about the LJ elections this summer had remarked about McCain. Tailoring it, sort of, but hadn't actually read the post.

[lttledvl.livejournal.com]

Yep. Harrisy just left me a comment on from one of those posts. *eyeroll*

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I barely have enough time on the computer to do what I need to do, between school, work, and fanfic. Spammers obviously need to be enslaved and put to good use. *g*

[lttledvl.livejournal.com]

Oooh, and now they're trying to be smart. By deleting the comment (which has already been done) it removes the 'mark as spam' option.

And since LJ doesn't have any other thingy to mark spam with, they're trying to get around that.

Me? I just flagged it anyway. Yah, it ain't explicit but it means that some yahoo from LJ has to look at the journal anyway.

I a stinker.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ah, good way to handle this. I've banned everyone I've been informed about. Apparently this new spammer is copy-pasting other people's comments for its spam.

[astridv.livejournal.com]

I got the same troll. Commenting under mariahkopp here (http://astridv.livejournal.com/112678.html?thread=1392422#t1392422) and weldonarnett here (http://astridv.livejournal.com/112678.html?thread=1392678). The LJs of my trolls look the same. Banning is probably useless since it looks like this person made a number of sock accounts. Sometimes I miss the good old days of the invite system.

What is weird is that the first comment I got was coherent and actually more or less relevant to the post in question.

eta: it's even more bizarre than I thought... I googled a phrase from said coherent comment, and actually found what I assume to be the origin of the comment, word by word, here (http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:W8HD5h05RFgJ:rtil.newgrounds.com/news/post/86785+%22I+hate+how+almost+everything+with+a+popular+name+attached+to+it%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=de&client=firefox-a). The troll... plagiarized its comments? That gives 'pointless' a whole new dimension. *is very confused*

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

A widespread ban at least renders the sock useless, but yes. We'll have to act fast to delete and mark the comments as spam. If they delete right away, I'll just put in a report to the LJ administrators explaining what the spammer did.

Comment plagiarism? *shakes head*

[astridv.livejournal.com]

Comment plagiarism? *shakes head*

I talked about this with friends, and we've come up with the hypothesis that we're not dealing with a flesh and blood human being on the other side. I think it's a robot program that's harvesting posts and comments all over the internet, and, when it finds similar patterns/key phrases in other posts, automatically reposts one of the comments from the original post there. That's why the comments are such a hit-and-miss deal.

We think it's a test run for some very crude AI, with someone on the other side harvesting the data in form of replies their auto-comments got... like, counting how high a percentage took the commenter for a real person. Their journals fit into that theory... each has one post that looks computer generated, ditto the usernames themselves.

I'm mostly annoyed that I wasted a perfectly good comment on some idiot who's playing around with spam software.

[sarcastic-irony.livejournal.com]

Unrelated, but may I sy I heart John Cleese:
http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?swf=http%3A//s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/cps-vfl59689.swf&video_id=jMyNk8J1c8g&rel=1&hqt=1&eurl=http%3A//calpoly.facebook.com/note.php%3Fnote_id%3D31240712604%26ref%3Dnf&iurl=http%3A//i3.ytimg.com/vi/jMyNk8J1c8g/default.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskJVkFbo3zktAexPXWu7h6qh&use_get_video_info=1&load_modules=1&fs=1&hl=en

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Well, John Cleese is the greatest. There's no doubt about that.