jsbarrett

Thanks. I was already planning on contacting these folks. I just wanted to know if there was any possible way for their comments to have been submitted without a form being on the page, like through some little-known back door method.

While chatting just now with the person who runs the ranch, I was told that they “forgot” that there were comments allowed before, and they were just recently disabled. Nice to get that info after spending hours trying to track down what I thought was a bug in the system. *sigh* Thanks for your help and patience.

Having waded through hundreds of comments over the years, I’m pretty confident in my ability to spot real comments vs pseudo-real comments. In the case of the few that I isolated yesterday, here’s the evidence that I see that tells me that they’re real:

• In the form data submitted, none of them include a backlink to another web site. They only have an email address.
• Two of the email addresses are tied to a local school.
• The comments all make very specific reference to services that are provided by my employer: horse camps, trail rides, etc. The following are some examples:

Hello, I was wanting to check your availability on your camps this summer in June? For two children. Thank you,

Jennifer

I found you guys through GROUPON that was sent to my email address. I am interested in enrolling my son in the Horseriding course. He is 9 years old and we would be able to attend the June 30-Jul 4th course, as I teach summer school and … can’t break away any sooner. Thanks for chatting with me on the phone this morning!
Have a blessed day!

What days are the trail rides? Is there one available this Friday, April, 11, 2014?

Hi, I was considering getting groupon deal for 4 people. Since we live an hour away from there, we were wondering about if there would be trail rides schedule on weekdays starting on March10th~14th (Spring Break)? Do we need to make reservation?

Re: the Groupon references in a couple of those comments, a large portion of the business that the ranch gets comes from a Groupon offer. This deal isn’t mentioned anywhere on the site, which means that those comments couldn’t come from spammers mining the site for random data they can use to make a comment sound legit.

If that’s not enough evidence, I looked up the IP addresses recorded with these comments. Almost all of them come from hosts in Texas from what I can see. We’re a Texas-based company, so that lends further credence to my theory.

Part of my concern, as you can imagine, is that people are sending these comments in and expecting a reply, but as far as I know nobody saw these comments until I found them yesterday. That means we’ve got potentially-dissatisfied customers out there, and I want to prevent that from happening in the future.