Spam continues to suck [EDITED]
[EDIT: I am a moron. This post, with all its spammy words and phrases, is an absolute spam magnet. I’m removing most of those words and changing the permalink to try to stem the flood of crap streaming into my comments.]
A while back I mentioned that I was getting bombarded with comment spam and was changing my comment settings so that I’d have to approve each new commenter by hand. This hasn’t been an enormous burden, as I’ve been visited by maybe two or three legitimate new commenters in the intervening months.
On the other hand, it hasn’t done much to decrease the amount of spam I get; it just stops that spam from reaching the public part of the site. [snip]
Most of these are shameless bits of spam and would get dumped into the moderation queue anyway, as they’re nothing but strings of links. But a few get creative and try to disguise themselves as honest comments. Most of them are still obvious and lame:
Hey I like your page keep up the good work. Heres a link to my site CHEAP V1AGGRxA!
Even if they’re not peddling penis pills, these are still easy to spot because they’re clearly generic.
Great site!
Love your design!
I agree!
A couple of spam-bits have been well-written enough to give me a moment’s pause. They have no links in the body and are composed of generally grammatical sentences that could be potential responses to a blog post. Just today it was suggested that I listen to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast*. A couple days ago I got another comment from the same “guy” on a different topic. These take a little extra care to recognize but are still easily spotted as blatant fakes, as they’re entirely unrelated to anything I’ve ever written.
I had a point, surely I did. I think it was that spam is a minor pain. WordPress has a blacklist feature that supposedly junks any comments containing particular strings of characters, but I continue to see comments from email addresses I *know* are on my blacklist. Boo.
Speaking of links (we weren’t, but it’s late and I need a transition), today we’ll continue in the living-abroad motif with Kat. Kat is a Russian Studies major (or something like that) at Stanford currently studying abroad in Moscow. Here is Kat’s blog. I don’t know her in real life, and I barely know her on the ‘net, but I do know that she’s fabtastic.
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* This is not the actual text of the quote. I’ve heard that these sorts of spam comments are sent out as scouts. A later search on that specific text will reveal all the sites which approved the scout comment, and those sites will be targeted for further spam-splattering. This may be entirely false, but it seems plausible enough, and I can’t think of a better explanation for these otherwise harmless comments, so I’ll not risk annoyance unnecessarily by posting the “scout” unparaphrased.
Tags: NaBloPoMo