SPAM on your blog, don’t ya love it? I use WordPress, and Akismet is amazingly good at intercepting SPAM comments and filing them in a “look at these and push the EMPTY SPAM button when you’re done” file for me to casually glance over every few weeks and dump. It is very rare that Akismet gets false positives, and I’ve caught those few pretty quickly.
Today, I checked my spam box in WordPress and at first glance I thought that Akismet had gotten some more false positives. The comments flagged were talking about typewriters, even specific brands, and seemed fairly legit… until I looked at the links and what posts they had replied to. Yep, Akismet was right on the nose. These comments are most certainly spam, as the linkfarming for empty facebook profiles and random replying to posts unrelated to the content of the reply can attest.
That first one is especially tricky. The guy is commenting on Hermes models with different ribbon covers, man that sounds like a legit comment. But, it’s a reply to my “About Me” page – which does not discuss Hermes rockets. That threw me for a loop for a second.
Anyway, I’m happy about how well Akismet works, and I’m wondering what you guys on Blogger use to deal with spammy comments?
Google has some form of spam filtering turned on automatically. I don’t remember a way to check what it has caught prior to hitting the blog.
After being hit with the link variety of spam you show above, I turned on moderation. That means a posting delay and manually checking each comment, but it is worth the effort. The captcha alternative has gotten entirely illegible and I have trouble doing comments on other blogs.
yeah, I agree about the captcha. the one Blogger uses is getting worse with every update, and it’s caused me to lose a lot of the comments I’ve tried to make on some Blogger sites. When I see that captcha, it’s a surprisingly effective disincentive for me to continue trying to comment. :P
I turned off captcha on my blog. Once every week or two I get a spam comment (e-mailed to me automatically). When I go to delete it, I usually find that it’s not there — Blogger has already deep-sixed it. Only once have I gotten a false positive, when Strikethru replied to my post on MS Word — her comment went into the spam filter and we were both mystified until I figured it out.
Very interesting! Looks like whoever programmed the filter pretty much knows all the spammer tricks – i am impressed!
When i started my blog just a couple weeks ago, i was concerned with spam.
I wanted to use blogger bc of the ease of use. But the big caveat was that i read that spam comments got through on blogger.
Therefore, i also started a wordpress bc the spam filtering was supposedly superior and you could create better looking, more customizable blogs.
To this day, i write a post in one and then copy it to the other.
I am coming close to choosing one but now i think your post just made me reconsider. HAHAHA
That’s a lot of spam you seem to get! In over 1200 comments, I got only 4 spams so far. Knocking on wood.
Nice typewriter what is like color like cheese sandwich. Say, would you like to buy Viagra, and type much longer without hand cramp? I haven’t seen you since typing class in high school. If you give me your bank account number, I can transfer lots of money from Nigeria so you can buy some more typewriters. How cool is that!
Now that makes me wonder if your comment made it through the spam filter alive.
Yep, WordPress remembers that Streamlinesdeluxe has made several accepted posts before and lets him say all kinds of funky things. Besides, his IP isn’t listed in Akismet’s spammer database.
I’m glad it remembers me, because I hate -HATE- having to type that verification nonsense which I can barely read.
Although I understand the desire to minimize spam, I hate Captcha with a passion.
I turned off comment moderation on my Blogger blog and have been lucky so far — keeping fingers crossed!
I switched from WordPress because I like Blogger’s networking features better.
But since I still have the WordPress blog (dormant) I have to sign in each time I leave a comment on a WordPress blog.