Yesterday I relaxed my comment spam filter a bit, and enhanced my comment spam reporting software. My site receives quite some attention by blog comment spammers and I do my very best to report as much comment spam as possible. Of course this is not going to stop spam especially not because a lot of blogs are already using an option that's bound to fail: filtering.
After a short time I noticed that a lot of links posted used the edu top level domain. Each URL contained one of the following: /_writingdisc/, /_disc1/, /_disc2/, /_disc3/, etc. I checked out a few of the pages and they seem to belong to an online discussion board. One with a serious security issue that's being abused at this very moment and many edu domains are now hosting pages with advertisements for cialis, viagra, tramadol, levitra, ringtones, etc.
Today I decided to do a quick check in Google:
I also discovered that this issue is not limited to edu domains. Also quite some org and com domains seem to be using the same software and have been abused in the same way.
If you're hosting spam for other sites I strongly suggest to report abuse to each and every hosting provider of all sites mentioned in each spam message. Many hosting providers will instantly drop the spammer and hence you can get some payback. I keep reporting spam posted to this site because it works: many times hosting providers do delete the site of the spammer. Also a lot of people are not aware that their sites are hosting spam, as I am sure is the case here. In that case they are notified by their hosting provider and can clean up the mess.