Interesting Observations

blogging, social media and self-improvement!

Clever Comment Spammers

Comment Spammers

I have been slow in posting but I regularly moderate comments and delete the spams but lately it has become more and more difficult to distinguish them from legitimate comments.

Following is a sample of what these scum bags have been writing and I just deleted almost 200+ comments that were left on different posts just today!    Reviewing such huge numbers of spam comments is a nightmare and it is possible to delete genuine comments accidentally but I hope I haven’t done that.

Here are some of them:

“great pictures, Especially for me at this winter time ,I am so in love with hot countries,Very peaceful!”

“Wow! this is a really nice blog. I loved reading it.
Thanks!”

“Nice info you have here..
I’ll use this a lot..thanks
and nice site too :D
“Good Afternoon…! ”
“Great Forum & Community!
I’ve been here as a freeloader for a while and finally got around to registration.
I sorta live online – spend most of my days addicted to social sites like MySpace.com and gambling sites like Betot.com.
Besides gambling (this week I made a sweet $2,000) off of betot, I love sports and hiking.
So that’s my self introduction. Happy New Year to All and hope to get to know you all better…
Peace…”

“The concept of holistic health is not new,but it was the first time I am listening to. Medicine is more an approach to how individuals should be treated, as opposed to a treatment method.”

“Howdy Partner, I fell lucky that I located this post while browsing for spyware doctor 3. I am with you on the topic of e going gets tough, tough feels like quitting |. Ironically, I was just putting a lot of thought into this last Thursday.”

“I think your blog need a new wordpress template. Downalod it from http:// genericwpthemes. com . The site has nice and unique wordpress templates.”

“I think you are thinking like sukrat, but I think you should cover the other side of the topic in the post too…”

“What if you are on someone else’s computer say, durning a hurricane evacuation. They dont tell you that have that type of spyware parents use to monitor the pre-teen kids and weeks after you leave, they go into your acocunt and go over all your entries? Is that wrong (ehtically it IS..I mean legally)?    Just asking because my paranoid aunt (erm..uncle’s wife) made my uncle go onto his computer and hell pulled up and printed every journal entry (including somebad ones about her…note – she’s a racist and I complained about it) on a site that you have to be a member of to read the entries, see member pages, etc.. (yes, I changed the passwords on ALL my frequently visited sites) and yes, after going to ther sites on their compy durning the Hurricane Ike evac, I clicked “Tools – Delete Browser History – Delete All” and they still got in…and the passwords were hard and in l33t.)”

HUH?  That last comment really got me thinking..   Is this person really a spammer or they were trying to make a point but I didn’t get it?   This was on the post When the going gets tough, tough feels like quitting
photo: dnorman

Visited 1 times, 1 visit(s) today
52 comments
Los Angeles Blog

I’ve been getting too much comment span and installed askimet. It really works but it catches a lot of legitimate comments and deletes them after 15 days. Do you use a spam plugin or do you review all the comments manually.

Los Angeles Blogs last blog post..Home Depot Center Job Fair Carson Los Angeles

oma

With WP-Ban plugin wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ban/ you can be able to ban full, partial or certain IPs, hostnames, country codes and more..I’ve banned few set of IPs from where I get bunch of spams.

omas last blog post..Validation- A Short Film

Glenn

Hi Pearl,
I agree with the person who said they used “Spam Karma” plugin.
You need to add an additional filter with Akismet, it just doesn’t get the newer spam messages for a few weeks, once they get hit though Akismet catches up as users report the spam comments. Which makes it a good long term continued solution. I haven’t tried Spam Karma but I use WP-HashCache which is great because A. It isn’t captch and B it uses a simple script to fool most bots. Once it’s tagged it ends up in your Spam comments and not on your blog and you can generally safely delete every comment in which hash cash indicates an invalid response. And best of all C. Real users who actually use a browser don’t have to enter anything hash cash is looking for bots and basically blocks all non browser comments, so you don’t annoy your real visitors.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-hashcash/

Glenn
:)

Pearl

@Matt: I’ll be a bit more stern with the spammers now onwards..

@snakes: I wonder how much time these guys have to do this.. sometimes I get 6 or 7 comments in a row from the same IP! ofcourse, they always get banned…

@Adam: Today’s been a good day although I haven’t logged in yet to see what didn’t get through.. I also installed another plugin for added security

@Airsoft: sorry if I ever hurt your feelings but on a blog that talks about fresh perspectives about self improvement and social networking, having links to airsoft guns and grenade launchers does sound a bit odd, doesn’t it to you? :)

@oma: thanks for the link to that plugin, I’ll look into it soon

@Glenn: thanks for the link Glenn.. I installed it last night and haven’t seen any spam yet – a couple of them did go in the moderation queue so hope this’ll work… I’ll also be installing the other plugin mentioned above.. I hope they don’t interfere with each other

so now I have Akismet, WP-hashcash

will be installing spam karma and WP-Ban and I’m hoping for a trouble free life! wish me luck! thanks for the input guys…

Jasmin Wilson@Fashion and vintage

Sometimes it is hard to detect comments that are Spam.
I think the best way is to see if it is relevant to what was written in this particular post. If the comment is too general – it is suspicious.

Jasmin Wilson@Fashion and vintages last blog post..Fashion & Accessories

Counseling Dallas

blogs with really great information. Unfortunately there is no really good way (that I know of) to avoid the spamming. Sure you can install these ugly things where you need to enter numbers or letters but I also feel that it’ll take away some of the real comments as people don’t want to do extra work.

Josh

Wow, you’re tough. Some of these seem well thought out. I hate those “nice info, thanks a lot” comments though. It really doesn’t take that long to make a meaningful comment.

dave so

I get lots of comment spam and not that many comments really. It does seem like the web is full of people who’s only purpose is to spam blogs. They may be getting paid well to do this, but doesn’t this seem really boring them?

Can’t spammers offer US some kind of reward for allwoing their spam. Howabout clicking a few of our Google ads (JOKES) or something like that. Maybe we should start a Spam For Clicks movement.. lol!

dave sos last blog post..Bank of England rates slashed to 1percent

becky

well nice post…thanx for sharing…lol… i knwo its really too much.and it hurts when people dont read your post and just for their benefit they give some silly comment.once i have uploaded really nice post about golden mac book i have given the prices and all and got one comment back from a user…that what would be tha prices for this one? prices are even hilighted with bold font in the post…well what to say…anyway you have choosen really nice topic to talk…i wish this get most popular….all the best.

@becky: call me paranoid but yours are the kind of comments that I get suspicious about! so Im sorry for I had to delete the link ;(

Joey

Wow, that last one was something. I agree with Lord Matts tactics. I encourage comments but I do check them all one by one and if I don’t feel comfy with a comment for any reason I delete and forget it.

On my hobby blog I kept getting this comment about how they were going to try my tactic on their blog. Ugh, what tactic about my favorite baseball player can you use on your credit card blog? Dude..

Joeys last blog post..Get Free Business Cards from LogoYes