Infosprite…

[...] something about infosprite[...]…

Oh yeah?

Spamming piece of shit…

[...] something concerning a funnel, a bottle of sulphuric acid and the spamming piece of shit’s colon[...]…

Mark Dulisse: I am the biggest internet marketing god alive http://holycrapIdeletedyourURL.com

You’re wrong Mark, you’re just a spamming piece of shit. I can only hope you come to pay me a visit when checking your spam penetration.  I would love to discuss with you how you might have come to such a mistaken conclusion concerning what makes you so special.

Here’s the spam, complete with links(don’t say I never did anything for you, Flux!)

FluxSEO the Leader in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
http://www.FluxSEO.com has come into the world with dominating style and a unique system like no other. http://www.FluxSEO.com leverages users around the world for a system link setup similar to a bot-net we are able to reach out to the world with the most organic search results and organic traffic for our companies. Our unique visitors around the world will be viewing and using your search keywords or key phrases.

Google?s Analytics system looks for 5 things.
Direct Traffic
Returning Traffic
Organic Traffic
Back-link Traffic
Search Engine Keyword ? Key Phrase Traffic

Since we use organic IP addresses and a percentage of them are returning traffic. While they look up on the search engines for your companies keywords. Thus taking care of search traffic, direct traffic and returning traffic. Also since our of system is fueled with static and dynamic IP addresses ranging from businesses to residential allocations, you have organic traffic covered. Now that leaves one system not taken care of ? back links. Through social media venues we can pick up the much needed back linking that occurs only when it is correctly submitted through our copyrighted Site Addition Tool.
To FluxSEO, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is has been and now is a complete science as a service. Companies offer to get you visible but none until FluxSEO could announce they could create a unlimited amount of daily organic traffic for a site.

FluxSEO
Website Cleanup (fixing errors on the site and bringing a site to WC3 Compliance)
Direct Traffic (Part of the FluxSEO Traffic Packages)
Returning Traffic (% Part of FluxSEO Traffic)
Organic Traffic (All of the Traffic from FluxSEO is Organic)
Back linked Traffic (We help create backlink traffic to a site)
Search Engine Keyword ? Key Phrase Traffic (FluxSEO system uses search engine keywords through Google, Bing, Yahoo and AOL) http://www.fluxseo.com/about-fluxseo.htmlhttp://www.fluxseo.com/tesimonals-and-statistics.html

First, let’s completely disregard the fact that a company that promises to utilize the above mentioned revolutionary methods to get your site to the top is using the same old and tired blog spam to get their site to the top.  Who cares how they do it, we just want results, right?  Well, let’s see what kind of results they get:

Search Engine Ranking Results:

Domain: fluxseo.com
Keywords: search, engine, optimization

Results:

Google:  Sorry, Your site was not within the ranks in Google™’s results (keyword:search engine optimization)

MSN: Sorry, Your site was not within the ranks in MSN™’s results (keyword:search engine optimization)

Yahoo: Sorry, Your site was not within the ranks in Yahoo™’s results (keyword:search engine optimization)

Ask: Sorry, Your site was not within the first 200 results in Ask™’s results (keyword:search engine optimization)

So let’s recap, shall we?  FluxSEO states that they will improve your search engine rankings(packages start at $500!  What a deal!)   They’re attempting to improve their site’s ranking via blog spam and finally, you can see how fantastically well their revolutionary placement services work by viewing their site’s rankings in the search engines.

So, pull out your checkbooks motherfuckers, hold on to your ass and prepare to be amazed!

Here’s a submission for you:

User: Justin Madrid

Name: Justin Madrid

Email: justinmadrid72@gmail.com

Comment:

Promotion of your website

We strongly believe that we have an excellent opportunity to increase the number
of visitors to your website through our white-hat SEO services. Please simply reply
to this message and we will be delighted to send you further information.

Although his offer is almost too good to be refused, I believe I may have outdone him.

Hi Justin,

I strongly believe you are a spamming piece of shit.  Please simply reply to this message with your precise location(either proper address or GPS coordinates) and I would be delighted to come find you, pull your bottom lip completely over your head and cockpunch you until both of your testicles are the size of weather balloons.

thanks,
json

I’ve been practicing on cantaloupes.

I digress.  Let’s get to the form bits.  In my past posts, I’ve spoken about broad concepts that have worked for me.  This time, I’m going to provide the actual code I’m using.    With my latest change of checking for a valid MX record, I’ve completely stopped spam on the form that I’m using this on for over a month.

Since I’m passing variables via a session, at the top of the file, I’m going to go ahead and start the session before anything else is done in the file.

<?php
session_start();

Then I create a couple session variables:

/*Anti-Spam*/
/*-We’re going to seed the input with a hidden and random value and we’re timing to find the slowpokes.*/

$_SESSION['AS_seed'] =  mt_rand(1000, 9999); //Pull a random number out of our ass between 1k and 9999.
$AS_seed = $_SESSION['AS_seed']; //We are going to use the random number to change the form element names.
$_SESSION['AS_substart'] = mktime(); //Pass the form generation time to a session var.

Now in the form, we’re going to create the inputs like so:

<input type=’text’ name=’”.$AS_seed.”email’ size=’20′>

So what we’ve done is we’ve made sure that every time this page is generated, the element name is different.  The reason for this method of protection is the fact that one method the spammers use to submit form spam is by crawling the site(or manually browsing), saving the page HTML and then using a bot to automatically parse the page to shoot spam off.  Since the element name is different each time, saving a copy of the form will result in erroring out on the submittal side.

So on the entry side, we’ve created a start time and we’ve given the elements a random name.  Now we need to do some things on the submission side.

/*Let’s submit the form!*/
case “submit” :

/*AS: Anti-Spam measures*/

/*Setting a time to compare to the form generation*/
$AS_subend = mktime();

/*First a value set by the submission form.  This should defeat bots that simply contact the form processor, bypassing the actual form page.*/
if((!ISSET($_SESSION['AS_seed']))OR(!ISSET($_SESSION['AS_substart']))){ //If either session variable is missing, then we know that the submittal was not made via the proper method(form).
$stop =’1′;
echo(“Text to let them know that there were no session variables present in the form.”);
}

/*If it took them less than 5 seconds to submit the form, they’re not human.*/
if($AS_subend <= ($_SESSION['AS_substart']+5)){
$stop =’1′;
echo(“Text to let them know that the post took less than 5 seconds to make.  Send them packing.”);
}

/*If it took them longer than 30 minutes to submit the form, they fell asleep and their comment is probably really too boring anyway. Send them back to start*/
if($AS_subend >= ($_SESSION['AS_substart']+3600)){
$stop =’1′;
echo(“Text to let them know that the post took longer than 30 minutes to make.”);
}

/* If they made it this far, then all we need to do is verify the sender. */
// email address validation function.  This does not check for a valid domain, only a valid structure.
// kudos to http://iamcal.com/publish/articles/php/parsing_email/
function is_valid_email_address($email) {
$qtext = ‘[^\\x0d\\x22\\x5c\\xa6-\\xff]‘;
$dtext = ‘[^\\x0d\\x5b-\\x5d\\xa6-\\xff]‘;
$atom = ‘[^\\x00-\\x20\\x22\\x28\\x29\\x2c\\x2e\\x3a-\\x3c'.
'\\x3e\\x40\\x5b-\\x5d\\xa6-\\xff]+’;
$quoted_pair = ‘\\x5c[\\x00-\\xa5]‘;
$domain_literal = “\\x5b($dtext|$quoted_pair)*\\x5d”;
$quoted_string = “\\x22($qtext|$quoted_pair)*\\x22″;
$domain_ref = $atom;
$sub_domain = “($domain_ref|$domain_literal)”;
$word = “($atom|$quoted_string)”;
$domain = “$sub_domain(\\x2e$sub_domain)*”;
$local_part = “$word(\\x2e$word)*”;
$addr_spec = “$local_part\\x40$domain”;
return (preg_match(“!^$addr_spec$!”, $email));
}

$email = $_POST[$_SESSION['AS_seed'].’user_email’];

if(!is_valid_email_address($email)){
$stop =’1′;
echo(“Text to let them know that the email structure was invalid.”);
}else{
/* If the “if” checked out, then we are dealing with a properly structured email address.  Now, the “else” will determine whether the email domain actually has an MX record. That means that the domain is not only registered but also is set up to accept email.*/
function verify_email_dns($email){
// This will split the email into its front
// and back (the domain) portions
list($name, $domain) = split(‘@’,$email);

if(!checkdnsrr($domain,’MX’)){
// No MX record found
return false;
} else {
// MX record found, return email
return $email;
}
}

if(!verify_email_dns($email)){
$stop =’1′;
echo(“Text to let them know that the submission failed due to no MX record.”);
}

//So, lets see if any flags popped up.
if(!ISSET($stop)){ //If “stop” is not set, then none of the checks above triggered it and we’re ok to submit the form.

$username = strip_tags (substr ($_POST[$_SESSION['AS_seed'].’username’], 0, 50));
$name = strip_tags (substr ($_POST[$_SESSION['AS_seed'].’name’], 0, 50));
$user_email = strip_tags (substr ($_POST[$_SESSION['AS_seed'].’user_email’], 0, 50));
$comment = strip_tags (substr ($_POST['comment'], 0, 2000));

$to = me@here.com’;
$subject = “Your site -|- Contact form submission”;
$message = “Here’s a submission for you:\r\n
User: $username \r\n
Name: $name \r\n
Email: $user_email \r\n
Comment: \r\n
$comment”;

$headers = “From: $user_email” . “\r\n” . “X-Mailer: PHP/” . phpversion();

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

echo(“Text to let them know that the submission was a success.”);

}

break;

Before I added the mx check, I was getting a single spamming piece of whale shit that kept hitting me with the same test post:

Here’s a submission for you:

User: bunqwputd

Name: bunqwputd

Email: aaivnq@gjpluc.com

Comment:

QHq9CT  exmlpcvlbyvq, [url=http://ywepjoknkzps.com/]ywepjoknkzps[/url], [link=http://fzzqigwvqeao.com/]fzzqigwvqeao[/link], http://zpedowpklfhx.com/

which doesn’t make much sense at first, but here’s the deal.  Most spammers don’t read the language of the page they’re on and they don’t have the time to decipher each form’s purpose.  They’ve got shit to post.  To help in their effort, they post bullshit like this and then see what happens.  If the resulting page shows their spam, then they know it’s a form they want to hit.  If it doesn’t, it’s time to move on.

I lucked out here because they use a random string for a domain name.  I suspect they do this to protect themselves from forms that block posts from known webmail domains that historically house spam accounts.  If it’s a bogus domain, then it’s definitely not going to be on any blacklist.

It will also not return a valid mx record

That’s it.  Months have gone by with no more spam.  If it changes, I’ll start playing with other things to try short of a CAPTCHA. I imagine I’ll begin running the content through Akismet.  For now though, this is doing the trick.  Hope it helps someone else.

With some real forward thinking going on, they’re proposing that the owner of the infected computer is notified and from there, an escalation of action including slowing the connection and ending with terminating service.  I imagine if the U.S. were proposing this, you’d be reading about prison time and compensation to your ISP for the lost bandwidth.

I hope it actually makes it to fruition, simply for the reason that I’m interested to see what the bot owners will do next.

Subject: Dear Child,
From: rose smith <asismith43@msn.com>

Reply-To: asifesmith.2020@live.com

Dear Child,

May God lead you my child.

My name is Mother Rose Smith,a widow to late William Smith, a business merchant here in London,who die after a protracted illness in may 2nd, 2006 ,I am presently undergoing Treatments in Southampton ,England. I have been diagnosed with hydatidiform mole cancer and esophageal cancer that was discovered very late due to lack of caring for my health.That was traced to be the source of my barrenness according to the experts. I have only about a few months to live according to this medical experts.

I am looking for someone reliable and trusted that can use my fund worth 7.5$ Million pounds,(Seven Million Five Hundred Thousand ) with CITI BANK UK for the less privileges and orphanage homes. Since i can’t survive this illness. Please contact me through this email address immediately with your

Name,

Address

phone number

and the Name of your Church:

Warm Greetings from,

Mother Rose Smith

I did the best I could with what was provided.

My dearest and most cherished dying lady with a shitload of cash,

It is so great to hear of your mortal illnesses, as I’m in great need of cash right now.  You can probably imagine what I could do with the money about as well as I can believe a single fucking thing you write.

You must be using one of those new fangled wireless air cards.  To help you get better performance out of it, you should run the configuration on it again.  If you’re in Southampton, England undergoing treatments, I’m sure you can find a closer wireless point than Nigeria, which is the IP your email was drafted from.

And my church?  Any one that says you’ll be spending eternity in hell is fine with me.  I’m fairly open-minded.

thanks,
json

Case in point:  During the reading of my aggregated news today, I came across an article on tuxradar, discussing the newest release of linuxMint.  Being the incredibly helpful person that I am, I wanted to post a comment regarding how unfortunate that mint decided to base their improvements on Ubuntu. After typing my thought provoking post, I began proving that I was a human:

Alright, man.  I did it.  I typed the letters as best as I could, seeing as how every month, the letters become more obfuscated.  I think I got it right though.  I click to affirm that I’m human:

Now, I’ve typed my post and I’ve entered two words with a space separating them, perfectly duplicating the mess I see as the challenge.  Upon clicking submit, I am now asked to copy the resulting six lines of scrambled letters into another text box, again to prove I’m human.

To all of the complete fucking morons that think reCAPTCHA’s method of preventing spam is a great idea: You deserve to lose the traffic and interactivity of every visitor who, like me, feel it’s your job to keep your site clean of spam, not mine.  Instead of proving a third time that I was human, I decided to move on, removing the site from my aggregator.

Spam is not hard to control.  You will find no spam on this site.  You’ll find no spam on my community sites that have forums. You also won’t find a CAPTCHA when you try to post a comment.  The reason for this?  I don’t feel it’s your job to keep my site free of spam.  That’s my job.  I view CAPTCHA’s as the first step webmasters took to relieve themselves of the burden of policing their site and placing it squarely on the visitor.  They’ve become commonplace and a generally accepted form of spam prevention.  Why not?  It’s not such a big deal, right?

Had the escalation of laziness stopped at the standard CAPTCHA, even I wouldn’t have such an issue with it, but it didn’t stop there.  See, people are too fucking lazy to create CAPTCHA’s, so a few entities integrated CAPTCHA’s into their applications and scripts for the webmaster’s convenience.  That makes sense.  I mean, if they’re so lazy that they’ll ask me to keep spam off their site, why not ask someone else for the mechanism to allow me to do it?

Only problem? Well, if you have everyone using the same CAPTCHA service, the botters don’t have so many systems to crack. The whole reason reCAPTCHA exists isn’t because CAPTCHAs are easy to defeat.  It’s because there were only 5-10 CAPTCHA systems being used.  The botters only had to break the default phpBB, vBulletin or Invisionboard CAPTCHA to have immediate access to millions of sites using the same system.  Had the webmaster been doing his job, reCAPTCHA would have not had a need to fill.

Let me be clear, reCAPTCHA works.  Of course it does.  It puts the visitor through so much shit just to prove they’re human, that it’s silly to think that a botter would be able to complete it all successfully.

Big fucking deal.  I can make it an incredible hassle for my users to post a comment without their help.  I definitely don’t see their method as being something to be proud of.

I had some problems on two community sites with bots.  It was clear that I needed some form of test to keep them off the site.  These are the two that I developed.  Since I implemented both of these, I have had a total of 0(zero) automated registrations on either site.

The first was a photography forum:

The second is a forum for the enthusiasts of the Husaberg motorcycle:

Now, when I integrated these into the sites, I was ready to expand on the idea, randomly choosing the challenge, obfuscating the image name so the bots couldn’t guess the challenge by the filename and more, but a funny thing happened.  This very simple and never-changing challenge completely halted the registrations.  I didn’t have to do any more work.  I invested less than an hour into each and completely resolved the issue with automated bots registering on the sites.

Why?  It’s simple.  I used something different.  I took the time to create something that the bots hadn’t seen before.  People that sell you Viagra, or pills that at least look like Viagra are dealing with millions of sites a day.  They do not stop to customize their scripts to each site.  They work in big numbers.  If your site doesn’t use one of the common CAPTCHAs, then the bot moves on.

I have never received a complaint concerning the additional step required for registering, but I have received comments by people that thought they were pretty cool or funny.  Something definitely needed to be done to take care of the problem and I needed the visitors help to do it.   The difference between tuxradar and my sites is that my sites takes the main element from the site that they’re at and use it to integrate the botcheck while minimizing any additional work on the visitors part.  Text you can’t read?  You won’t find it.  Copy and paste to another box?  Not on my watch.  Mathmatical equations?  Don’t make me laugh.

My point is simply this.  There is no reason, other than laziness for the insanity that is reCAPTCHA.  If you visit a site that has reCAPTCHA on it, it’s because the webmaster doesn’t care enough to prevent spam on his site.  He’ll just have you take care of it for him.

If I were you, I wouldn’t put up with that shit anymore.

Please note that her post is sitting in the spam bin.

It makes you want to give her money to get to the top of the search engines, doesn’t it?

Here’s their article in full (Hey, I figure someone should get the search results):

Thats a great post I read it all. there are things I agree and there are things I disagree, but than all them I wanna share with u an article I loved similar with this theme…

Sell More Books With an E-mail Newsletter

NOTE: Because many words in this article are likely to trigger sp^m filters, we’ve disguised them with symbols (e.g. sp^m). This will ensure a higher delivery rate if you use this article in your e-zine.

If you’re selling your book online, you’re practically guaranteed to increase sales by publishing an e-mail newsletter, or “e-zine.”

Why? Well, for a start, it’s a super way to give readers a taste of your expertise and style along with samples of your content. This ensures they’ll come to be familiar with you, trust you, and hopefully buy your book when they’re ready for more information.

Also, it’s a great way to *capture prospects* who aren’t ready to buy your book when they visit your site, but are still interested in the info you have to share.

Based on my own experiences in marketing my manual, ‘Boost Business With Your Own E-zine,’ here are 7 ways to help increase book sales using an e-mail newsletter.
• First thing: Encourage e-zine SIGNUPS on your Web site where you promote your book.

Before you even begin publishing, start collecting e-mail addresses. Place a signup form in many places on your site to invite visitors to subscribe to your free e-zine. This way, if a visitor isn’t interested in buying your book today, she can sign up for your free e-zine. Now you haven’t lost her, and she’ll learn even *more* about your book from being a subscriber.

E-zine publishers also report GREAT signup results using pop-up and pop-under boxes at their Web sites.

Examples: On my main site, http://www.woopsIdeletedyourURL.com, I feature a signup form on EVERY page, as well as a pop-up box. On my book sales site, http://www.woopsIdeletedyourURL.com/tutorial, I have a pop-under box that appears once you close the main window.

Remember: NEVER sign anyone up without her permission!

• Feature EXCERPTS and/or TIPS from your book in your e-zine.

These can be either direct excerpts or short tips that summarize some of your content. Go through your book and highlight individual tips or small sections that could stand well on their own. Just don’t give away the whole store! For example, giving your readers a whole chapter of your book in each issue is going overboard.
Besides lifting material directly from your book, try some other spins on your topic such as a list of top 10 tips, a how-to article, a list of resources, or a review of a trend in the industry.

Example: One of my clients, a life coach, has a hard-cover book out right now that features 101 tips on how to attract what you want in life. Each issue of her weekly e-zine features one of those tips, along with a brief explanation of how
to implement it.

• Directly after your article, give a quick PROMO BLURB that shamelessly plugs your book.

Why right after the article and before anything else? If someone reads your article/tip and says to themselves, “Gee, that was great information,” they’ll be ready to hear what else you have to share on that subject. Really pump it up
and have a good time with it.

Example: “Did you like today’s article? If you did, you’ll LOVE my new book, ‘Double Your Business in Six Months.’ It’s jammed with more than 257 great ideas to help you grow your business FAST. Learn more and order now at [Web address here]. You can begin using my best tips within minutes!”

• In each issue, offer a TESTIMONIAL from one of your book purchasers. Let your readers know that many other people just like them ARE buying your book and LOVE it. Idea: Create a small section in your e-zine for this purpose.

In each issue, feature a short testimonial from one of your readers here.

Example: “What ‘Beauty Blastoff’ Readers Are Saying: ‘I can’t tell you how much your book has helped me improve my appearance. Thanks to your tips, I’ve lost 20 pounds, cleared up my skin, and rid of all my unwanted hair. Now my rich ex-husband even wants me back. You’re a saint!’” — Suzy Smitten, Los Angeles, Calif.

• Offer your readers a SPECIAL DISCOUNT for a l1mited time.

Make your readers feel special by offering them a special discount on your book when you can. For best response rates, make it a limited time offer to lend a sense of urgency. I did this with my manual when it first came out and got great results.

Example: “For Subscribers Only: Buy my book before midnight this Friday and receive a 20% discount!”

If you can’t give your subscribers a discount, offer something else to make them feel special, such as a bonus report or free phone consultation with their purchase.

• Mention your book in as many other places as possible in your e-zine.

Bottom line: The more you mention your book, the higher your chances they’ll buy. While your opportunities are endless, here are a few ideas to start with:

• in your masthead (This is where you give the reader info about your publication— usually at the very top.)
• in your editor’s or publisher’s note (This is where you give a personal note to your readers.)
• in your article (If you mention a certain point that you cover wonderfully in your book, say so!)
• To attract even more prospects, advertise your e-zine in your everyday email SIGNATURE FILE.

You know what a signature (or “sig”) file is, right? It’s that little blurb with contact info that you can automatically insert at the end of every e-mail you send. Besides your obvious contact information, give a quick plug for your book AND e-zine. Why? Well, if you just advertise your book, some people will read your sig file and think, “That’s cool, but I don’t want to buy anything right now.” BUT if you advertise your FREE e-zine, they’ll likely take advantage of your offer. THEN you’ve got them on your list.

Example: Here’s what I have at the END of my sig file, after my contact information: “BOOST BUSINESS by publishing your own e-mail newsletter!
Learn how now — sign up for fr*ee how-to tips at http://www.woopsIdeletedyourURL.com.”

(c) 2000-2003 Alexandria K. Brown. All rights reserved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexandria K. Brown, “The E-zine Queen,” is author of the award-winning manual,
“Boost Business With Your Own E-zine.” To learn more about her book and sign up for
more FREE tips like these, visit her site at http://www.woopsIdeletedyourURL.com