The new fashion of complimentary comment spamming is kind of a pain to deal with. These are the comments that say things like the following:
"Great, article. I bookmarked it."
"Thanks for the info. Reading the blogs provide much needed support."
"Thanks for this post"
"Thank you for the wonderful Blog.."
Make no mistake about it. While the comments seem innocuous, they are spam. Following the URL associated with the user confirms that they're pointing to some spam farm. But the tough part, is that these are not spam farms for your typical, ahem, prescription medications for men. A lot of the sites these links are pointing to look like legitimate blogs, but they're not. Others look legit, but are in foreign languages, so I can't tell what they're hawking.
Monitoring the whole thing is rather a time suck, but I've gotten to the point where I'm just frustrated by having to see these things litter my comments. It's been a few good years having Akisment flag the comments that are clearly spam, but the clever tactics of this new phase of spammers looks too real, and might in fact be getting generated by this new workforce of human spammers I've been reading about.
So from now on, I'm going to actually hover over links for these short 1-3 sentence compliment spams, and if anything looks even remotely suspicious, it's getting marked as spam by my comment spam module. Hopefully, if more people do this work of crowdsourcing the spam marking, more of the culprits will get blacklisted and be prevented from re-appearing on our sites. Short, complimentary commenters beware. Your days are numbered, and you haven't defeated me yet.
Comments
02/26/08 @ 11:36
you get these spam even with that captcha?
i get a few of those "Great!" / "Thanks!"comments but most of them have very suspicious urls, so it's no problem to differ them from real comments.
02/26/08 @ 13:14
Yes, I do. I've been hearing that some people are actually creating sweat shops using humans to actively post spam to blogs. Humans can beat any captcha, so it does become a matter of monitoring these things manually if the spam modules you're using aren't yet blacklisting new spammer IPs or links that occur in the homepage field or in the message body. Using the spam module I've got, I am marking/submitting the comments as Spam to the spam service, so at least they get flagged.
I'm wondering if it would help things to get rid of the homepage field and remove all HTML formatting from the comments and link translation. Might be a deterrent anyway.
04/13/08 @ 10:14
I agree, this is a really annoying part of being a blogger -- but it comes with the territory. The best thing to do is to try to weed out as much junk as possible with scripts (captcha, etc.) and the rest, simply take a deep breath and delete.
Keep your chin up. :P
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