One of my regular tasks as administrator of this site is to moderate comments to the various WordPress blogs — News, Reviews, Perspectives, Roundtable, and my own personal Views from Medina Road. All comments submitted to the blogs are held pending an email sent to me to either approve or disapprove their posting. The disapprove options include ‘spam’ and ‘trash’. There are also options for ‘reply’, ‘quick edit’, and ‘edit’, though I’ve never used those.
I mention this to explain first, why some comments submitted by users don’t appear on the site for some hours — that is, because I’m away from locusmag email during the workday (I have a dayjob; running this site is an afterhours task), and don’t see these comment emails until evening (or the next morning, for those submitted overnight US west coast time).
Alas, spammers attack blog posts with fields for comments. A few weeks ago I tried solving the persistent spam submissions by restricting commentators to those who could log in to WordPress. Unfortunately, this seemed to block many legitimate commentators, which in retrospect explains why, as I remarked in On Mixed Marriages, there hadn’t been any comments to a Perspectives post by Gary Westfahl. So… I removed the restriction and became resigned to dealing with the many approval emails from spammers every day. This continues.
The second reason I mention this is that I can’t resist noting that there is a persistent spammer, who submits comments — consisting of dozens of links to various international sites with suffixes such as cz.cc and iz.nu, and whose title (do not Google this) is aeroriJeots — to a certain Cory Doctorow column called “Persistence Pays Parasites”…
Well, they are indeed persistent, but I spend a few minutes every day trying to assure that their persistence does not pay.
That’s all for tonight.
Don’t you just hate that? I get comments on my blog all the time that are identical to the one you just mentioned. I also get many from different spammers that are identical text in the body of the comment. Drives me starkers, but I will slog through them anyway and delete them. There is no such thing as the ultimate spam filter, they either work to well or not at all.
I forgot to mention another frequent spammer — someone whose messages are yet another collection of links, yet which for some reason are always headed ‘be happy ducks’. I should have used this as the post title…
They’re persistent because they’re mindless software. They’re spambots that try to post comments to any story, but especially to any “popular” story, which they probably come across linked multiple times due to a spidering algorithm. But they don’t attack “your” site, they attack any site that’s visible to them due to linking from another site.
According to Akismet, I’ve deleted 5,727 spam comments from http://www.lawrenceperson.com/; real comments are an order of magnitude less…
“Be haapy ducks” has been pounding my site. It makes it easier to spot on my Blackberry as spam. It was on my site 9 times tonight. It’s so annoying.