Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Wonderful Spam!
Well not really wonderful... AWFUL!
I've been quite pleased with the fairly steady flow of comments I've been getting from outside the WA community. However, I recently became a little concerned that one or two of the comments on my site may possibly be spam...
With a little help from ThomasPaul (thanks by the way!) he advised that I type the offending phrases into google to see if there were any matches.
There were! Every single suspected phrase proved to be spam and cropped up on loads of blogs as well as spam comment lists... I'd spent quite a lot of time giving careful responses to the comments so it was a bit of a kick in the teeth...
This was enough to make me suspicious and sceptical, not to mention a little annoyed! So, I checked out ALL the none WA comments. Guess what?! Every single one of them spam!
Boy is my face red! Well not really, it's early days yet and I wouldn't necessarily have expected any outside comments yet. But, when you thought you were already getting comments and then find you really weren't it's a teeny confidence blow...
While I have SI CAPTCHA activated, I don't have Aksimet activated so perhaps it's time to do just that!
If any of you are having similar problems I found these sites useful (as well as a little entertaining...) for identifying a lot of the general spam templates that seem to fly around:
http://gizmodo.com/5925990/the-hugest-most-verbose-and-least-grammatical-cache-of-spam-comments-ever
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4584
And of course ThomasPaul's method of plugging the phrases into google worked great for me.
Well, you live and learn! Time to go out and attract some genuine comments!
Incidentally, the comments on my site now look a little lonely after all the rubbish has been swept away... so, some real comments from lovely WAers would be much appreciated! www.amputeelifeblog.com
Thanks, Dom.
Recent Comments
5
What was it that made you wonder if it was spam? Did they post links in the comments or something? I'm new to all of this, so I'm just wondering what to look for...
Yeah same here. It was basically comments in poor English and ones which are very generalised and don't refer specifically to the content of your site or that particular page/post. If you follow those links there are some good examples. Also the second link explains how the spam bots do it and how the language ends up clunky and jumbled.
No links or anything though. That's why the red flag didn't pop up immediately as I didn't really know what to look for...
Okay... that's strange. I'll look into that. Thanks for the info though! :)
No problem :)