It's unfortunately really easy to generate BlogSpam for Movable Type blogs. (I don't know what it is like for other engines, like Blogger or Radio.) There's a handy list of Moveable Type blogs < a href="http://www.movabletype.org/donors.shtml">here. Scrape the HTML, and you get a base list of domains. And because most people install MT in the default location, all you have to do is append "/mt/mt.cgi" to the domain name to get the location of the MT engine.

After that, all you have to do is create the appropriate HTTP message to send to the engine, and off you go. You'd have to guess at the blog ID and entry ID, but you can just generate random numbers for that.

If you wanted to make sure that you posted your spam to the latest blog entries, you could grab the RSS feed from blogs that have them, and scrape it to get recent entry IDs.

It's almost surprising it doesn't happen more often...

Posted by: Martin on October 8, 2002 08:35 AM

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Do-able, but a daycare provider with an AOL email address? Feels like an amateur job...which does happen. Just last week I had a piece of spam come in that just *felt* different - it was related to my hobby and for some reason just seemed like the attempt of an internet newbie to gain business for a new ecommerce site, not knowing anything about spam. A quick email with some pointers to spam definitions and ramifications got an apologetic and grateful response.

Posted by: Mike on October 8, 2002 10:04 AM

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How very odd that anyone would think they could drum up business that way. I would think that common sense would tell them anyone would be too pissed off or just plain baffled by an ad showing up suddenly in a thread that they would not call for service. They might call to complain, though.

Posted by: Lydia on October 9, 2002 05:07 PM

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