Almost impressed by this spammer

[andrewducker]

On the one hand, nice try to make it look like they're not spamming, but are actually offering useful advice. And on leaving a 12-hour gap between the two comments.

On the other hand, they should have made the link into an actual links. And, most importantly, not have posted the spam on a post from four years ago, where nobody but me would ever know it existed.

Comments

[melchar]

Think it's Russians? The ones who spam my *really* old posts always seem to be Russians.

[andrewducker]

Could be. Hard to tell.

[miss_s_b]

... and that one person who still has an active sub to the comments on that post and has just realised

[andrewducker]

True. Anyone with enough subs to have one on a post from 2012 is now being directly marketed at!

[matgb]

IIRC, LJ doesn't let you make things an actual link in comments unless you're a logged in LJ user, I hope they haven't let FB logins post encoded links.

But yeah, that's a new one.

[darkoshi]

It isn't likely targeted at people who follow your posts, but rather people who are searching for "sample IRS W-4". When I'm searching for something, and the answer happens to be in a blog, I don't care how old it is, as long as it is still relevant.

[darkoshi]

And putting the comments on an old post makes it less likely that the blog owner will notice and delete them. I suppose not everyone has notifications turned on. But a lot of spam comments I get are on very old posts too.

[marahmarie]

I was going to leave a top-level reply to say the same thing, because yeah, there is less chance of being noticed on something from years ago (but what gets me is they'll leave these comments on old posts even seeing as I screen comments, which means I'll catch them no matter what, as I have to approve each and every comment I get).

And re: the first reply/Russian spammers, haven't seen those in a few years on DW, but up until then they were leaving the vast majority of spam I got.

Oh, and to add..

[marahmarie]

One trick I use is to Google the comment text itself. If it's a spammer they will often leave identical comments by the dozens/hundreds/thousands all over the Web; googling will bring up the vast majority of them.