Watch Out For This Comment Spam
I’ve seen a new type of comment spam appear in the past few days. Maybe you’ve seen it before.
The savvy spammer knows that Akismet and comment rules engines will stop spam with specific URL’s, IP addresses and email addresses plus posts with links in them will be moderated by many blog owners. What’s an enterprising comment spammer to do?
What they do is make a comment on your blog, most likely with an automated tool, through a proxy with a ‘borrowed’ email address. They don’t include a URI link. The content of the spam is the key because it contains all those ‘bad neighborhood’ words, like one beginning with ‘V’, with the addresses of gateway sites, such as buymybadneighborhoodstuff.blogspot.com, typed out but not hyperlinked. The goal is to get a visitor or web site owner to manually cut-and-paste the address into their browser’s address bar.
Moderate Comments By Word
To block this kind of comment spam, go to Options|Discussion in the WordPress admin screen and scroll down to “Comment Moderation”. Add the spammy words to this filter so that any comments that contain them will be put in the moderation queue.
Be careful though. The inside of words will be matched so you may block more than you want to block. Fortunately, many of the words common to comment spamming aren’t parts of common words.
A Neverending Battle
It never ends though. Determined spammers will always find some angle to get comments onto your site. However, by making it more difficult you’ll cause them to find lower hanging fruit.
What are your thoughts? Have you seen this kind of spam? What are you doing about it?
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