This blog’s dashboard has a line that says this: Akismet has protected your site from 128,720 spam comments already, and there are 4,868 comments in your spam queue right now. I rarely look at the spam queue. The only time I’ve found false positives there are when some of my own comments have gone into the spam queue, because the system flags as spam anything with more than two links in it. Now I know where to look for linky comments that go missing.
Some spams get through, though. They’re easy to spot. Most of them respond to an old post about a topic of interest to the spammer. Let’s say I mentioned fly fishing sometime last year. I’ll get a post by zxzzyks452 at Hotmail or Gmail, and a blog address like flyfishingflyfishing.blogph0rm.com. The entire response will be “I agree. Keep it up!” or something equally innocuous and positive.
The top spams in the queue right now say, “Hehe! Good work!”, “I want to say – thank you for this!”, “Great site. Good info”, “Thank you!”, “Great site. Keep doing.” “Realy, realy nice work! I was impressed! My own are… (bunch of spammy links)”, “Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.”, “Incredible site!”, “Perfect work!”… and so on.
That last one came from a user calling himself or herself “GetXanax” at http://openlibrary.org/, which may not know it’s been hijacked by a spam system.
Anyway, this is a long-winded way of saying that I delete nearly every comment that responds to an old post with language that looks like the examples two paragraphs up. I don’t think I’ve killed any good ones yet, but every once in awhile I wonder. Wish it were otherwise, but it ain’t. Life in the vast lane, I guess.
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