Site weirdness and comment spam
The site was down for a few minutes, but it’s back up now. After the site came back up, I started looking through my Comment spam to see if I could find any legitimate messages that may have been marked as spam. The WordPress Askimet plug-in does a great job catching spam, and I’ve learned to trust its filtering capabilities – but every now and then a legit message gets incorrectly flagged.
Given the built-in spamming I’ve got on the site, it puzzles me as to why spammers continue to send their garbage. I moderate ALL comments, and none of these messages will ever get through. So, why even try?
Anyway, what puzzles me the most is comment spam that is complete gibberish, like message below:
or brown-nosing type comment spam like:
Any idea why spammers even try – it seems so… futile.
-Krishna
These beautiful and intelligent people wrote
Tell me what you think!
Gregory Lemon
June 7, 2008 at 6:27 pmHey Krishna,
My theory is that they want the link that is placed on your site back to their site via the comment author link. Every link back to their site increases Google ranking. They’re just scamming the system.
Love you comics, keep up the great work. I especially enjoy uncubed.
Thanks, Greg
Alainn
June 8, 2008 at 6:08 amThe gibberish/brown-nosing spam is used to build a trusted rating with spam-blockers like Akismet because there’s no actual spamming. After a couple of those post they’ll place the actual spam that they hope wont trigger the blocking.
krishna
June 8, 2008 at 9:42 amThanks, Greg. That makes sense for the comments that include a URL -but what about those random bits of gibberish with no URL that make up a good portion of comment spam? Still scratching my head on those.
BTW, Thanks for the kudos on the ‘toons!
krishna
June 8, 2008 at 9:48 amahh, thanks Alainn – makes sense now.