I am used to spam by now. You find it everywhere – emails, blogs comments, entire sites are spam. But all have one factor in common – it must benefit the poster in some way. Now I have come across a new breed of spam that is forcing me to re-evaluate my beliefs.

I get this in my Bin-Co site. It has a feedback form that uses Ajax to post the comments. It will function even if javascript is turned off(Graceful Degradation). If a bot is using this form, it would use the non ajax part – while most human(with the exception of people with very old browsers) will use the ajax version of the script.

Now about the spam messages I am getting. I am getting these spam comments for a while now – there will be a slight change in the message and the email id – but you know it is from the same source. These are the things that I noticed were odd about them…

• They do not have any links in it
• It uses Ajax version to post the comments
• All the comments have an AOL email address – like laura@aol.com – the id changes – but the email provider is always aol.com.
• The comment talks about a link – but no links is present(eg “What do you think about my sites?”)

What really baffled me is the fact that it is using the Ajax version of the script to post the comment – I did not think that there are bots capable of such complicated processing. Maybe it is riding on a browser engine. Also no links are there – how could the poster benefit for these?

An example of this type of spam…

Really good site, and a pleasant suprise[sic]… Good Luck!!! What do you think about my sites?

Have you had any experience with this kind of spam?