For some reason, all I can think of is: “Bloody Vikings!”

42 megs of plain text - Wow.

One of those random-text spammers keeps hitting a certain old post of mine.  I keep banning IP addresses, thought about closing comments on that post (it’s not a big-deal post or anything) but maybe they’d spread to other posts.

But why spam random strings?  Maybe it’s a proof of concept, building up to something.

Damn, but you people are a chatty bunch.

Stupid Evil Blah.  Blah blah, blog blah.
Yakkity yak, we talk back!

But why spam random strings?  Maybe it’s a proof of concept, building up to something.

Maybe they’re testing the sysop’s response to it.  Checking to see who lets it slide so they’ll target those sites?

The two theories I come up with on the random strings nonsense are: 1) They’re testing a new automated spam script that can handle captchas or 2) they’re attempting to poison the anti-spam filters by conditioning them to random characters.

The two theories I come up with on the random strings nonsense are: 1) They’re testing a new automated spam script that can handle captchas or 2) they’re attempting to poison the anti-spam filters by conditioning them to random characters.

Damn those are two good theories!  Probably a mixture of both in reality.

13mb in 7 days for a SQL file is HUGE!!!  But hey, at least you’re popular!

From a little research...it appears that it is mis-configured spamming software. They are spamming you in a language other than US-English, and the content shows up as gibberish. It’s happening at other sites as well. Although your other theories are also possibilities. Captchas are starting to fail, as newer spamming programs have OCR built into them. The whole arms race thing

kjlfhsglknsjfngklsdfhg;lhjsoghjfs

Am I considered spam?

Hard to say. It made more sense than most of the rest of your comments.

I have had a bunch of those random-character spams on a single old post for the last 10 days.  Why just that one post?  Then just now that post got hit with a large entry of conventional, link-laden spam.

Seems unlikely the steady stream of random-character spam, and the conventional spam that just arrived, were unrelated.

I just started forcing everyone to have an account to be able to comment.  It dropped my spam down to essentially nothing.

Webs, if you have that level of access, mod-security is your friend.

Yea wordpress allows me to force people to register if they want to comment.  I am not really going to do much with my website at the moment though cause I am planning on moving my hosting from GoDaddy to a home hosting solution. 

I am hoping to have that done before the end of the summer.  At which time I plan to update the software, get some good mods for spam, and open up comments to unregistered users.