Uh, why are people surprised at spammers targetting web forms?

They've been doing it on forums and weblogs for years...

No, they use the actual form on the web page.

By and large not automated, though.

Yes, but I was under the impression that people wrote software which would spam, say, WordPress blogs, or phpBB forums, where there's a lot of examples on the web so a lot of spamming to get done. The live forum page is just a one-off script, so somebody's written a general purpose script which can spam anything with a submit button. That's quite clever.

Yup, of course, because all the clearly automated spam I've come across in my Internet travels was nothing more than halucinations, as are all the provably automated spams I've received on my own forum and web forms.

Feel free to post any non-automated spam, and for each one I'll post a link to a forum full of blatantly automatic stuff to prove that, by and large, it is automated.

Well it's a one-off form that just happens to sport very similar fields to stuff like WordPress/etc.

Notice how the 'forum name' field has the name of the 'poster', and the 'forum owner' is just some numbers.

It doesn't require much code or intelligence to write something that spiders the web and posts in anything that resembles a comment form.

I meant it was by and large not automated until recently- showing me lots of it compared to a small quantity of manually made spam wouldn't really be in any way relevant. Apparently you find my view offensive. Of the three web sites I run, it's only within the last maybe six months or so that I've seen any web form spam.

 

Now, it isn't because of it changing position on Google or something (well, not in at least two of the cases), so something happened. Maybe I was just unlucky. Maybe you need to calm down. Who knows?

Well if you meant recently, it would help to actually use the word (or a synonymous one) in your post. I can't read minds across the Internet. :S

I'm not sure what part of your view you think I found offensive either. Maybe you need to calm down. ;)

Certainly, recently, there have been significant increases in spamming. Five or six months ago sounds about right, and also in the past couple of months (especially e-mail-based stuff, in my experiences)
Probably a/some succesful virus/trojans creating lots more zombies or something.

My post stated that as far as I was concerned they had not been automated "for years", so it's kind of implicit that I consider to have started recently.

Irrelevant, mind.

I was reading, a few days ago, about "captcha" sweat shops where people are being paid a pittance to spend all day manually filling in formas etc specifically to get round the visual recognition thing

 

they post the exact same spam so it could look automated but it's done manually

I haven't heard of sweat shops, but I have heard about it being done on porn sites - complete a CAPTCHA or ten to get free access.
Afaik, it's just the actual CAPTCHA images which are being filled in, and the rest is automated.

Eitherway, if it's being done by mindless drones, does it matter if the drones are electronic or biological?