Akismet-100 Spam-1
Sunday, this blog hit the century mark in spam.
Amazingly, all 100 were stopped by Akismet. It did not miss a single one.
Then it got caught, the 101st spam, a trackback spam got through. Sneaky huh?
It was easy enough for me to spot. The message said the commenter found information he had been looking for.
The comment was on the Linkie Winkie Post!
If you will take a look at the Linkie Winkie post you will find that there is absolutely no information in it. None. Zip. Nada. Nothing. Zilch.
Since I do not know what Linkie Winkie is, I cannot provide information about it.
I do not understand why comment spammer still try to spam WordPress blogs.
Nearly all WordPress blogs have a no follow on the links by default. Spammers get no PR from the link.
The blog the trackback was to was just a repeat of the same spam link. Over and over and over and over.
Not hard to miss.
Anyway, Akismet had been awesome.
It had spotted spam that I would have missed. By now I assume Akismet already knows about the spam that got through this time and will be blocking it for everyone else.
Lorelle On WordPress has an article on comment spam:
Sneaky Comment Spammers
The sneaky comment spammers are the ones you really have to look for. They require more work to determine if they are legitimate. These are the nice comment spammers. They say things like:
- “I really like your site, keep up the good work.”
- “This is a beautiful site.”
- “It looks like you worked hard to create this site. Good work.”
- “I like what you have to say. I’m going to tell my friends.”
- “This is really good information. I’m going to mark it as a favorite.”
When these first started showing up, I preened. I even pointed them out to my husband with pride. Then I learned that these were NOT legitimate but creepy comment spam robots that were lying and creating links to their sites. Some investigation found that some of these links were indeed hooking up with pharmacy and gambling sites. DAMN! These are the sneaky comment spammers! More and more comment spam prevention tools help to eliminate these, but if you get a lot of “nice comments” within a day or two across many posts – you’ve been hit by a sneaky comment spammer.
You can read the rest here on her site.
Akismet doesn’t “know” until someone marks the spam comment as spam. It learns from our efforts to put a stop to comment spam.
Comment spammers aren’t necessarily targeting WordPress blogs, they are spamming everyone, including those on WordPress. It’s an equal opportunity attack.
Don’t feel special.
Nofollow doesn’t work. Never did. Never will. So spammers don’t care about it. In fact, there is little anyone does that comment spammers care about. They just figure out how to beat it, like they have with CAPTCHAs and quiz torture tests (can you add 6+1?). Akismet, as you’ve figured out, is great, but I highly recommend that self-hosted sites also use Bad Behavior and Spam Karma as backups. Just in case.
Glad it’s working for you. It is working for millions, all working together to cut out comment spam from seeing the light. Hopefully, someday, we’ll have the courage to put them out of business, not just in darkness.
Thanks Lorelle,
I’ve used SK for the past few months in addition to Akismet. Akismet is a fantastic resource and gets nearly all the spam.
In fact, Akismet has caught nearly 50,000 spam comments here since this post.