Two instances of comment spam this morning, and a couple of others over the past few days. These tend to be of two types:
1. Gosh! I love your page. Here’s a long list of links to various pr0n and gambling sites you may enjoy.
These are easy to spot. They may not even include the “Gosh! I love your page” part.
2. Good insight. Here’s what I got on the test. Interesting article.
These are a lot less easy to spot, on the surface. I get a number of relatively innocuous postings like this, too. They don’t have long lists of links — but they do include a link to a commercial site in the poster’s URL. They may not be pr0n sites; they could be hosting sites, or book sites, or others; I’ve seen several instances of this.
That means they get through the initial MT-Blacklist screen — but are still visible to Google (hence their worth to the spammer) and to me (hence my ability to quickly swat them before they give a Google boost).
And I do spot them, folks. I read pretty much every comment that goes up here (the number is not that staggering, and a list is kept up at the top of the blog — you may have noticed it). And I get mail copies of all blog comments, too, which makes such sins even easier to spot.
(I could, I suppose, mask the URL of commenters just as I do the e-mail. But I find it a useful identifier. So I won’t.)
In any case … just don’t try it. Okay? Because I spot them, and yank them, and screen against them in the future. And because I report these things to the MT-Blacklist clearinghouse, too, and they put them on the mast list of Nasty URLs, and that means even folks who aren’t a diligent about screening their blog comments will be protected.
Beware of Dog. Keep Out. No Soliciting. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.
UPDATE: Note that this applies to (a) unsought solicitations and (b) hijacking my blog to boost the Google ranking of your commercial site, legit or not. It does not apply to people posting inane or contrary or dissenting or goofy comments. Those I leave, unless they are simply a personal insult. Even then I’m likely to leave them as examples of the idiocy of the commentator, since they are almost inevitably riddled with errors grammatical, orthographical, semantic, and logical.
I found a comment on my latest post with an Italian email address, name, and links to two Save-the-Starving-Children urls. I deleted it because the barely grammatical English referred to my site as a “company,” thus identifying it, by my criteria, as spam, since obviously this fellow didn’t even bother to read my blog. (If he was a fellow, and not just a bot.) Also, I don’t care how noble your cause is, comment spam isn’t going to get me to care about it. (I get my comments emailed to me too. Mama didn’t raise no fool.)
Update: ooh, he’s done it someplace else. Why are spammers so stupid? (Rhetorical question, I know.)
I will delete almost any comment that irritates me in even the slightest way if it is posted anonymously, with a fake address or by a drive-by moonbat. I know who my regular commenters are and they can say pretty much whatever they like. I see the Flea as an exercise in publishing as much as an exercise in writing and I get to be as picky as I need to be to publish remarks under my masthead.
I will (and, in fact, have, just this a.m.) delete spam with commercial URLs, even if couched in innocuous terms or even making a possibly legit inquiry. I have an e-mail link on my page, just for those sorts of purposes.
This is my billboard, not theirs.