It just occurred to me that in the world of webmastering (OK, website administration), we apparently have no annual recognition in the industrious field of proliferating those delightful creatures called spambots.

In my experience administering websites, it’s not real human spammers who are causing the big problems of spam in blogs, forums, etc. — it’s the automated spam delivery robots.

• They break your captchas, and thus are leading to captcha designers making them nearly impossible to read by real humans (esp. those with older, deteriorating eyes like mine).
• They register for your blogs or forums, using fun e-mail addresses like dildoman2352@gmail.com (or anything@.ru), filling in numeric fields with text, setting the preferred timezone to -12 (where nobody lives), and then they lurk until they find the juiciest time to leave their spam droppings.
• They screw up your logs with fake referrers, apparently believing that showing Russian sites to American webmasters is such a great way to advertise.

You get my drift.  And I’m sure you have plenty of additional examples if you’ve been running any websites for any significant length of time.

So, I thought it would be sick (in the good, dark comedy sense of ‘sick’) to have an awards program for our friends, the spambots, and their enablers (and of course, the good guys who help us stamp them out).  I wanted to dub this program “The Spammy Awards” or “The Spammies”, but a quick Google search foiled that.  So, I decided to call this extravaganza “The WebCommons Spambot Awards”, or “The Spambotties” for short.

Because this is kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing, I just threw together ten categories for the first annual awards.  So that the second annual awards are more complete, I’ll have a nomination category called “Most obvious missing nomination category for the Spambotties “.  We’ll take nominations for two weeks, then present a series of polls to determine the winners and runners-up.

What’s the award for the winners?  Well, in the bad categories, it’s global damnation by website administrators (which will have to be enough because I really don’t want the legal exposure of shipping feces through the mail).  In the good categories, it’s a big ol’ pat on the back by millions.  Who doesn’t want that?  (maybe next year we’ll have real prizes… heh)

See the nomination categories after the jump…

In responses to this post, please give us your nominations for the following 2012 WebCommons Spambot Awards Nomination Categories:

(Please nominate no more than 5 entries for each category)

First, The BAD…

CATEGORY 1 – Internet Service Provider (ISP) responsible for the most bothersome spambots you see hitting your sites.  Please don’t include purely hosting/cloud entities.  I personally nominate Comcast (U.S.), OVH (France/Ireland), TurkTelecom (Turkey), and Smile/Golden Lines (Israel).  (Note that some of these may provide hosting services along with Internet access.)

CATEGORY 2 – ISP least responsive when dealing with reported spambots.  I personally nominate Comcast.

CATEGORY 3 – Hosting company or cloud computing platform  responsible for the most bothersome spambots you see hitting your sites.  I personally nominate Softlayer/ThePlanet (U.S.), Ubiquity/Nobis (U.S.), EGIHosting (U.S.), Reliable Hosting (U.S.) and Amazon AWS (principally in the U.S.).

CATEGORY 4 – Country responsible for the most bothersome spambots you see hitting your sites.  I personally nominate Russia, China, Brazil, Ukraine and the United States of America.

CATEGORY 5 – Most conspicuous technique/tool used for automated spamming.  I personally nominate XRumer.

CATEGORY 6 – Most invasive or brutal technique/tool website admins use for stopping spambots that ends up regularly stopping real human users.  I personally nominate Re-Captcha.

Now, The GOOD…

CATEGORY 7 – ISP most responsive when dealing with reported spambots.  I personally nominate TELUS Communications (Canada).

CATEGORY 8 – Large Hosting company or cloud computing platform with surprisingly few spambot problems.  I personally nominate Google App Engine (U.S.).

CATEGORY 9 – Least invasive, yet effective technique/tool for stopping spambots.  I personally nominate StopForumSpam.com, Wizcrafts.net block lists, Akismet (WordPress plugin), WP Captcha Free (WordPress plugin), and the technique of catching values longer than the maximum character limits in a field (which a bot can post but a human can’t enter).

Last, The NEUTRAL…

CATEGORY 10 – Most obvious missing nomination category for the Spambotties which should be included in the 2013 awards program.

Now, what are your nominations?

Update: If you would prefer to e-mail your nominations to us, please fill out this form.  Thanks!

Update 2: I added another nomination to Category 3 to make five entries from me.

Update 3: The nominations period has been extended.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2012 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Web Security, WebCommons Announcements, WebCommons Spambot Awards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.