Spam Blog Comments

I don’t know if it’s a natural result of increased traffic or what,

but over the last few weeks, my spam comment count has gone from one or two a week to thirty or forty a day (which means I have ten times as many spammers as real readers!). I check the spam queue once or twice a day, and occasionally, I have someone I know who has ended up in there for who knows what reason. Other than that, there seem to be only a few basic types of spam comment.

1) The fake gusher.

You know these are fake from the very beginning. They never have anything at all to say, just the vacuous noise of Old Faithful (who’s not so faithful anymore, by the way):

• just stopped to say have bookedmark you blog…love love love it!!!!!!!!
• I come here frequently, and I agree with everything you say.
• Excellent blog. I will copy your desing (sic – not sure what it meant – design, i guess)

2) The fake advice-seeker.

• wonderful blog do you do it yourself or have a techie?
• I visit this web page oftern. Great page. I have few question about WordPress you can answer. (Bonus points for the improper use of “web page.”)
• can you tell me how you put video on this page? It looks great and I want to do it! (There is no video anywhere on my blog, so…)

3) The fake ditto-head.

• I agree with everything you said in that wonderful blog. (Bonus points again – improper use of “blog.” It’s a post. The whole thing is a blog.)
• Very good points, i concur.
• I have researched this, and many people would agree with you.

4) And, of course, the fake drugstore.

• The one that goes [drug name][link] [drug name][link] [drug name][link] [drug name][link] [drug name][link] ad nauseum. (Does anybody really think that works?)

The one thing they all have in common, of course, is that the link or email address they leave always points to a sales site of some sort, or a get-rich-quick (and-make-me-rich-even-quicker) scheme, and when in doubt, you can always cut part of the text out and google it. If you find the same string in a thousand other blog comments, there you go. Spam.

But here’s the odd one:

And it’s a brand new one (to me anyway). Twice in the past week, I’ve found comments that were copied word-for-word from another comment on the same post! The comments that get copied are from people I know (Mark Barrett once, and Zoe Winters once), but the email address and/or link left by the spammer don’t match up. And, of course, there’s the little fact that I already got that comment! Last week, or the week before, or the week before that! When the blog post was still fresh and still getting comments!

Do I look that stupid?

Don’t answer that!