Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Comment Spam

During the past two weeks my blog, which seldom receives comments, has gotten some comment spam.

All is unusually polite, with some generic blurb about "Have you written more on this topic?" or "It is nice to have found someone who shares my opinion," before the link to another website that is the actual purpose of the comment.  The plethora of spelling and grammar mistakes add to the entertainment.

Oddly, as blog author I receive e-mails about these but they do not appear in the blog.  It is as if Blogger notices they are spam and removes them, but only after sending me notice of their existence--which seems different from how the comment's anti-spam measures intend to work.

Here is my favorite so far (with the link removed), which seemed programmed to detect blogs with few pictures.
I was wondering if you ever considered changing the page layout of your blog? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.  But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or 2 images. Maybe you could space it out better?  my website..
I wonder who is going through this much effort to put links on random blogs?

That spam's question might actually deserve an answer: perhaps when Gallant is done teething I'll again have time to blog regularly about the family photos I still am quietly putting up on the Picasa albums.  For now, here is a recent favorite: Smiley on his big new backyard swing.

 

2 comments:

Andrew Stiltman said...

I get the same thing. I'm pretty sure the ones I get use algorithms to find similar but kind of unrelated blogs, then copy comments from there.
I am wondering how they get past your captcha (or was that a recent addition?)

davidvs said...

No, the captcha has been active all along.

They are all from "anonymous", which provokes the slightly scary thought that it is not an automated script but a warehouse full of typists in a country with very low minimum wage.

(Slightly scary because copy-and-pasting blog comments with links seems much less dreadful than other warehouse work for people that needy of income.)

Neither alternative explains why they "get to" my e-mail but do not appear on the blog.