My WordPress blog now seems to be getting around 500 comment spam a day. All successfully blocked by Akismet – eat that you spamming sacks of shit! The downside of this is that if I forget to clear the spam traps for even a few hours it builds up to the point where checking for false positives is a pain in the arse. In other words, I’m deleting huge chunks of comment spam and just living with the possibility that legitimate comments might get caught up in the filters.
A quick tip: the thing most likely to get you caught in the filters is including more than one URL in a comment. I’m not trying to put people off providing relevant links (I like links) but more than one greatly increases your risk of being filtered as spam.
I’d actually like to single out two of the spammers for special mention and tell you what I’m going to do to them if I ever catch them. One of them precedes their URLs with a line of broken English saying essentially “Hi, this isn’t spam.” There’s something about the sheer affront of this lie that makes me want to punch the person in the face. Then there’s the one who submits literally hundreds of URLs in each spam which seem to take forever to scroll through.
If I ever catch this bastard I’m going to shoot them in the face so their mother can’t give them an open coffin at their funeral (I’m channelling “Goodfellahs” today.)
Angry 365 Days a Year 
hmm. I must be very naive [new blogger] but what is the point in spamming? No-one ever buys any of the things on offer, it seems such a pointless exercise [and jolly irritating] What am I missing. Cheers [I await enlightenment]
Spammers are millionaires. No shit.
Spammers aren’t actually people, they are bots or code. I think that I read somewhere that the world’s worst spammers were actually from Quebec, Canada and were filthy spanking rich.
@mcewen, it’s a numbers game. If they spam hit enough blogs or emails, there is always a percentage of idiots who will click on a link. Out of those idiots, they make money.
“This will make my dick bigger? Really? I hadn’t thought about that, I didn’t think it was possible. I need that Swedish penis pump right away!”
Personally, I can’t hit the delete button fast enough. Going through the spam? Are you kidding? I just delete everything without reading them. I get between 250 to 350 per day. Maybe it’s more, I don’t know, I just DEL.
Between that and the racist haters, there is nothing worse.
I mean, if you don’t want to be labeled a spammer, don’t spam. Or don’t post more than two links. WP is set up to moderate any comment that has more than 2 links I think.
I have actually had to edit comments of people who were blatantly self promoting their blogs. BTW, check out my blog on the same subject, it rocks!
Die spammers, die spammers!
I have a feeling the spam is more there to drive the websites up the search ranks than to drive customers to their websites.
Hi, you have a very interesting and informative website! Check out http://www.meettheloveofyourlife.com to meet your perfect match!
Spammer’s exist because they can send out millions and millions of messages via email and blog comments at almost no cost. This means that even if only 0.0001% of their messages generates a sale, they still make a profit. It is this business model that causes each of us to get daily doses of spam.
Since we apparently cannot educate the morons on the Internet who respond to spam, I would instead impose a cost per message on the Internet. This has sometimes been referred to as an email stamp. Even if it were only one US penny per message (about $1.75 Australian? ;), this would destroy the spammer’s profit incentive and send them all back into hiding like the cockroaches they are. In addition, for this small cost everyone would benefit by not having to devote a percentage of our computing power/harddrive space to filtering messages for spam content (scanning for viruses is a separate matter) or even paying for software to do this function.
mcewen: these days most spam is sent via zombie PC networks – people’s PCs are infected with malware and they don’t realise their machines are being used to send spam. So the cost to spammers is almost zero, the effort required by spammers is almost zero, but they get a higher than zero result – so they keep doing it.
Range: spamhaus has a good list – the worst are in Russia and North America. And your blog does indeed rock.
Massif: you’re right – a lot of spam leads to search-engine oriented sites.
Michelle: very funny! You see Akismet knew you were a trusted poster!
Jeff: the problem with that is it’s too easily abused. Ordinary users have their activities “taxed” and big companies cut deals to have their spam “legitimised”. Plus, you’ve got the US/AU exchange rate pretty accurate! 🙂
I’m planning on taking some time during the Christmas holidays to write a firefox/greasemonkey script similiar to wpcatr (http://engtech.wordpress.com/tools/wordpress/wpcatr) specifically for dealing with the Akismet page on wordpress.com to make it easier to go diving for mislabelled spam.
Any feature requests?
My initial outline:
– copy navigation to bottom
– only display excerpt of comments, with a MORE to expand.. make it easier to scroll
– might include a REPORT ME link to make it easier to flag blogspot blogs etc.
Those are some awesome initial features! I’ll put a bit of thought into it and get back to you.
Dayum Spayum!
Is there a way to spam them back with all of our sites? Seriously maybe the spammers are dumb and they actually might click through on some of the links. Is there a way to monetize the spam that comes into our comments so that WE make money and they don’t make any because we have somehow scripted it to do so.
My latest round of spammers are scraping content off of my blog and spamming it back at me in quote form and then BLOODY bolding a “payday loan” beside it.
I am truly fed up. This is unfair, unethical and rather psychotic in nature. It actually makes me wonder sometimes why I’m not spamming. I don’t know how quite honestly but would love to somehow throw it back in their faces and become stinking rich in the process. I’m angry MR. ANGRY!
I think you pinned in down when you say psychotic. At the very least it’s some chronic anti-social personality disorder. The problem is, nobody in law enforcement or government takes it seriously. They’d rather persecute people taking photos in public places or harassing anyone brown who has the audacity to get on a plane.
If only some of the effort dedicated to security theatre was expended on spam, the problem would be over next week.
It’s very strange though that the way they cope with this disorder is to spam. Most like me 🙂 take to actually communicating with others online. At least that is what I keep telling myself. 😉
Could you please email me as I have an angry article for you to post if you like. I tried both your emails to no avail… are you real?… or were the emails a typo 😉