I’ve noticed an interesting trend in inscrutable comments lately. These messages tend to be complimentary in a diffuse way, never addressing my site’s specific topicality but instead offering an overall positive assesment like, “I enjoy your articles. The good content is the key. I hope you have countless visitors.” Yes, I hope so too, but what’s your angle?

These comments, and I’ve received a number of them, always come from a site with a name like fabmart, fabgalaxy, or fabcenter, usually with a .info extension. The sites themselves are as inexplicable as the comments, blogs populated by strange snippets of European literature. Neither the comments nor the issuing sites have noticeable ads of any kind. So, though there’s undoubtedly a scam here, it must be a subtle one.

My suspicion is that these comments are Trojan horses of sorts designed to get spammers behind the security of comment moderation. The way comment moderation is set up on 10,000 Birds is that I have to approve every new commenter, but once someone is approved, he or she may comment with impunity (so fire away, friends!) These fabcomments are so innocuous that it seems a shame to mark them as spam. But spam them you should, because when the other shoe drops, these innocent compliments probably won’t seem so harmless.

If you’ve encountered these comments on your own site, let me know. I haven’t uncovered much information about them beyond personal experience.

Written by Mike
Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds in 2003, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.