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Monday, August 18, 2008
A devious new form of comment spam
I’m encountering a new breed of comment spam on my blog.
To date, comment spam has fallen into a few basic categories. There’s nonsensical spam (like ). There’s blatant spam (e.g., lists of Viagra sites). There’s spam designed to make you think, with the quickest of glances, that it’s legit (such as, “Great post.")
Now, though, I’m getting spam that shows the spammer has actually read the post; the spam offers varying degrees of legitimate commentary, but includes the link to the same sites that were being promoted in the other forms of spam.
I got one today, for example, to a post I wrote a few months about about a team of Emerson students who competed in an advertising competition. The comment reads, “Thirty-three Emerson students are in Beijing this summer working for the official Olympic News Service. The students are working side-by-side with professional staff to cover Olympic events, to provide background information to the media on athletes and competitions and to create materials for the international press.”
That’s a legitimate comment, directly related to what I wrote. The name of the commenter and his URL, though, point to a pool building company. I also get these with apartment finders and other similar sites.
I’m in a quandry. Do I leave these up because they really do respond to the post? Or do I take them down because they’re blatant spam? Clearly, somebody has devised this approach as a means of defeating Akismet and other filters and getting bloggers to leave the comments untouched. They submit these comments only to older posts. It’s devious, but possibly effective.
Has anybody adopted a policy for dealing with these?