I had turned off the need to moderate comments before their appearance on this blog as an experiment to see how long it took for spammers to start posting. Turns out, it was not very long… but taking 25 days is still slightly longer than I had expected. So comment moderation is turned back on.
While most spam is obvious posting of links to websites, I just do not understand some of the spam that I have received. One IP address (which is well know for its spam), posted messages like “The best information i have found exactly here. Keep going Thank you” and “Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue,so thanks for posting“. Do a google search for those phrases and note how frequent those exact comments are. What is strange is that the “people” posting these comments seem to have nothing to gain, at least initially. They listed website their website as google.com and their email address is not shown so no-one can reply to them. I suppose they want to get through that initial moderation phase so that they can posted unhindered crap in the future. You have got to admire their determination…
Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue,so thanks for posting.
😀
Yeah, i had the same comments at my own blog recently, really wierd …
I guess someone should really investigate this issue
Yeah, I didn’t do comment moderation initially either, and I can’t remember exactly how long it was to the first spam comment but it wasn’t long.
I do two things now so I don’t have to manually moderate. First, I use the great http://akismet.com/ blog comment moderation API, which has a Python module, to screen the comments as they come in. If the service marks them as spam, I simply hide the comment from public view (although it does end up in my comments storage). The second line of defense is a banned IP table- if I see spam rolling in from an IP address more than once, they end up in this table and they are done forever from bothering me.
I belive WordPress has built in integration of Akismet, so you might want to give it a shot.
Most of those are likely automated bots. I imagine they spider around, and attempt to post benign messages. If it succeeds, then your site is probably listed/flagged as postable, and fed into some kind of list.
My hunch is that the actual ‘spam’ job runs on that list, possibly from different IP addresses or something.
Just a guess, but I really doubt there is some guy manually going around and making all those posts.