Spam
Since moving my weblog to a new location, it’s already attracted a few dozen spam comments. Fortunately, the Akismet plugin caught them all. The general goal of comment spammers is to place links on other websites to generate traffic to their own website, with which they hope to earn money. Most of them don’t care too much about the contents of the comment. The latest batch of comments contains one that says only, “vzoexdhd…”. Well, that’s easy enough to mark off as spam.
Other spammers are a bit smarter and compose something that may pass as a genuine comment on a quick glance, like this one:
Hi there, I read this post titled “Rain, more rain, and a BBQ” about a week ago, might have been last Sunday, and thought it was a good point. I’ve been trying for the last few days to find your site again but ended up finding it in Google using the keywords “floor restoration.”. Anyway, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to post last week but I will be returning regularly. Bookmarked the page.
Of course it’s complete bogus, but on sites with high traffic and lots of comments, this could get through. In my case, it’s clear that googling on “floor restoration” will not get you to my website. (Except that after I post this, it may.) It’s also suspicious that this “visitor” read a blog entry from June 14, 2007 just last week. Finally, the comment is so generic that it could apply to almost any post on any weblog—another clear sign that it’s fake.
As long as Akismet does its job, comment spam isn’t bothering me too much. In fact, most of the messages are quite nice. All eight readable messages currently in my spam queue mention how much they like my site or how much they agree with my writing. It’s utter nonsense, but at least it’s friendly nonsense.