Since setting up this weblog, I’ve gotten a fair bit of comment spam here and there. It used to be pretty harmless: my entry about Adobe Photoshop Elements got an ad for someone’s book on Photoshop. Delete and move on; easy to identify and less frequent than people who accidentally post their comment or trackback multiple times. Also, easier to understand than the comments in Norwegian, Korean or German.
Recently, though, I’ve started getting comment spam of a more insidious nature:
Very quiet in this thread lately. More comments please.
I got this one twice:
here is a free tip:
if you don’t know what you are talking about don’t post online.
I’m sorry I don’t buy what you said but it’s to cheap.
The trouble with these comments is that they sound reasonable. In context, they’re a little odd, but people are odd sometimes. Maybe it’s just coincidence that the author’s URLs link to sites trying to sell something. Regardless, they felt like spam to me, so I deleted them. My weblog, my rules, right?
I’m not sure what I’ll do if it gets worse, though. I don’t want to spend much time policing my weblog, and I don’t think anyone sells spam filters for Movable Type. I could implement some sort of registration system, although that’s likely to discourage one-time commentors, which I don’t want to do. I could turn off comments entirely, although that would probably discourage them even more…
I just blogged about this today too.
If you google “comment spam” you’ll see it’s becoming a big issue in the blog world. I think it’s because spammers have discovered that our blog entries tend to get ranked high in Google and the linkage helps drive traffic and rankings to their own sites. I don’t know. It’s a problem. But there is a plug-in due to be released tomorrow that hopes to make blocking this stuff easier for us running MovableType.
http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2003/10/mtblacklist_monday_hell_or_high_water
Interesting. Thanks for the link; I’ll definitely have to keep an eye on that. Of course, if it doesn’t work with SimpleComments (which I use), I imagine it’ll work even less well with MTThreadedComments (which I also use).