Yesterday my wife decided to turn on comments on her blog and this morning, she had her first comment. The content of the comment was kind of trivial, but it was on the subject of the blog post, it also contained a link to a post on another blog. The linked post was also relevant, but I was still suspicious. A little later, I was checking the traffic stats for her blog and noticed that the only visitor to her post in the past day was from India, which seemed odd, since the commenter was purportedly in North Carolina.

We went back and looked at his blog more closely, and then looked at some of the comments he’d left on other blogs. They were starting to seem a little spammy, so we decided to unlink the text in his comment.

I’ve since done a little more digging, I searched on “static96-217.staticcal.vsnl.net.in” which is the name from the reverse DNS lookup on the host that left the comment. It shows up a lot, mostly for sites that have their web traffic stats crawlable, but I found a few where it is clearly associated with script generated spam comments. I suspect that it’s either an open proxy, a compromised machine, or someone doing link spamming to make a little money who has started to offer a bit of a human touch.