Can you get high off of this stuff?

Published Fri, Apr 14 2006 5:46 | William
Since we've moved MSMVPS over to Community Server, comment spam has been a lot better to deal with. In the old days, we either had to make readers suffer through CAPTCHA hell or go through hell cleaning out spam.  If I had a dollar for each person that couldn't post because of the CAPTCHA [including me], well, I'd retiring early.

So I'm looking through my comments and see a few of them flagged. I don't have an expiration on my comments but it doesn't autopublish certain ones, and it's quite accurate. Anyway, I can't seem to figure out what the deal is.  When i get spam, I at least expect something like "P3n1s enlargement, C1alis, V iagra" or "Teen Cut1e with blue a33ed babboon - includes ATM".  I got a ton for 'hydr0cod0n3" and "V4l1um" and the like.  I got a ton for Texas-holdem-P0k3r sites.  All of that, as annoying as they were, at least made some sense - at least from the perspective of spammers.  But now I'm getting bombared with ads from phentermine and tramadol. I MSN Search  it and i just don't get it. Doens't look like you can get high off of the stuff and it doesn't seem to have any desirable effects.  Doesn't look like it's hard to get either. Heck if you hit MSN Search and put in either of them, virtually every site is a commercial one. Here's a description of one of them:
Seizures have been reported as a rare side effect of treatment with tramadol. The risk of seizures may be increased in patients who take more than the prescribed dose, have a history of seizures or epilepsy, have head trauma, have a metabolic disorder, have a central nervous system infection, are experiencing alcohol or drug withdrawal, or are taking certain medications. Talk to your doctor about factors that may increase the risk of seizures during treatment.

 • Do not drink alcohol while taking tramadol. Alcohol may cause a dangerous decrease in breathing and/or liver problems when used during treatment with tramadol.

 • Use caution when driving, operating machinery, or performing other hazardous activities. Tramadol may cause dizziness or drowsiness. If you experience dizziness or drowsiness, avoid these activities.

 • Do not take more of this medication than is prescribed for you. If the pain is not being controlled, talk to your doctor. Taking more than the prescribed amount of this medication could result in seizures or decreased breathing.

I don't know, it just doesn't sound all that great to me. So wtf is up with this stuff? On the off chance I wanted to order something from a spammer, it sure as hell wouldn't be something that causes seizures and decreased breathing. So why are the spammers pushing it so much?
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Comments

# Brian Madsen said on April 14, 2006 5:51 AM:

Maybe there's a whole truck of it that's "gone missing" and they're going to have to sell the stuff off..to heck with whatever it does, or is used to treat - imagine how many idiots would actually go through the effort of buying it?

funny enough you should mention going to Community server..i had to leave my last blog behind (at dotnetjunkies.com) because i got bombarded with way too much spam.

i simply could not locate a true comment in amongst the 0nl1n3-p0k3r-t3x@5-h0ld3m ads, and each time i did post another entry it took less than 1hr before it got spammed to death. so i left it.

hopefully my new one at msmvps.com wont succumb to that crap!

# Tobin Titus said on April 14, 2006 2:29 PM:

Breathing is overrated. Besides, lets say that you really liked greenday, for the music, not the marijuana. So you decided to go to a concert but you were afraid of getting a contact buzz and messing up your next hair test all because you decided to enjoy the ever-so-clever lyrics of Greenday in person. SO what's the answer? Apparently, the spammers know! Take some of this stuff, decrease your breathing, and you can enjoy a contact-buzz-free outing. Of course, you wouldn't know it because the lack of oxygen to the brain could create a residual free experience enhancement otherwise known as a high.

I think, for the large part, any time you put drugs up for sale, people will try it at least once. Then of course, there's the people who have to try it a second time thinking that maybe they didn't do enough of it the first time to make it worthwhile, right? That's why I always post those links on your site.. I mean, that's why THEY always post those links on your site.

So onto the spam comments in general, I got bombarded on my msdn blog the other day and found it very convenient that none of the comments were public and the interface to remove multiple comments at a time is SO much better than it used to be. That being said, I still want to implement some sort of baysean spam filtering for comments that would allow me to dump comments into a spam folder that the software could "learn" from.

# Anatoly Lubarsky said on April 14, 2006 11:36 PM:

The main reason behind this is the fact that drug keywords pricing is very high over the net especially google adwords and such, providing comment spam as such, spammers are pushing traffic and PR to their sites, their ad revenue goes up.

# Bill said on April 15, 2006 12:30 PM:

Hey guys, thanks for the comments. Anatoly, let me ask a follow up question if I can just to make sure I follow you. If I had a 'legitimate' site selling Phertermine or whatever else, if I try to advertise on Google it's going to be comparatively more expensive as compared to say, selling a .NET Add-in. So they do the comment spam thing to try to increase Google mojo and at the same time, try to increae their site's visibility? Doing this makes a lot of sense I guess - I'm just sort of surprised that it works. Assuming that I was going to buy drugs off of the internet, I think finding it via spam would make me less likely to buy it. But there are probably lots of folks that don't care.

Brian - you can moderate comments but even if you don't, a lot of 'spam' comments don't automatically show up by default. I have my settings to always allow comments no matter how old a post is (which as a rule, most spam hits older posts) and to not moderate comments. So when I check my Feedback section here on MSMVPS, I look specifically for comments that aren't posted yet. I can't tell if it's flagging them b/c the post is old (although I don't have an expiration) or what, but 99.99999% of the time, when I see a NO in a feedback entry, it's spam.

T: Can you discuss the MSDN blog interface? I'd really be interested in learning what sort of features it uses b/c I"m guessing it's pretty kick a55. Ladybug was an example of a product MS Used that wasn't all that cool, but I'm guessing their blog engine and settings are top notch. I think a key to not getting spammed is writing some of your own stuff, so they can't target your site with an outof the box too. If nothing else, making it harder for spammers is a cool thing to do.

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