Over the last few weeks I’ve been receiving comments from people called “Guardian Dental” and “Cisco Vpn”. Now, I’ve heard some funny names in my time but I’m pretty sure we haven’t stooped as low as naming our children after insurance and networking tools.
The problem is, aside from the spammy name and URL the comments are genuine. They are relevant to the entry and often consist of more than a few lines of text so at least a little bit of thought has gone into them. The quality of the English is not the best, but then neither’s mine at this time of the morning.
I’m not going to approve the comments of someone blatantly adding their site/comment for the sake of link backs and possible PR juice. However, I also can’t edit the comment and call it Anonymous because that would give the impression that I allow anonymous commenting (I don’t). Lastly, I don’t want to assign a random name just for the sake of having an extra comment on the entry.
At the moment these not-so-spammy spam comments are sitting in my moderation queue, but it made me think about how we draw the line between spam and not-spam. Is it spam if its in the slightest bit questionable, or just if it’s full of “buy my viagra”? How do you figure it out?
28 Sep at 9:26 am
The weird names are usually a giveaway, but generic flattering comments are also spam, although easily mistaken for relevant?
28 Sep at 9:41 am
You could just remove the URL and leave the stupid name. :) Generally, I wouldn’t feel bad deleting those, to be honest.
28 Sep at 10:17 am
They could just be reaaaally smart spam bots that post entries according to key words they find across your page. Let’s say 1. Scan page for words of interest. 2. Found a lot of instances of “XHTML”. 3. Search for matches between words across the page and words in our random comments. 4. Found following matches: strict, xhtml, xml. 5. Post comment #32578209752735
28 Sep at 10:18 am
I be spamming Jem’s comments, but I just realized I used “random”, but if that’s how they do their spanning, it’s definitely not random!
28 Sep at 11:54 am
Okay, relevant, but still pretty generic, right? To me it just looks like spammers have gotten a bit smarter. :P
28 Sep at 12:21 pm
I’ve been working up to a post on this myself recently. My view is that if the comment is relevant but the link is clearly for linkback purposes, then I will remove the link but retain and even reply to the comment. It is possible that they are bots (I had a comment on one post that had picked up an acronym from the post, but got it wrong and discussed something completely different) or people being paid to comment. Removing the links should stop them benefiting, but doing it in a fair way is the main problem. In light of that, I’m going to be writing a comment policy that clearly states my feelings on this, so that there is no argument. The problem is that even though spam beating techniques are getting better, so are the spammers.
28 Sep at 12:22 pm
I look for weird URLs, normally in this sort of format: somerandomsite.com/some-random-page-with-lots-of-dashes-in-it.html I too have been getting the “legit” spam. I think they scan the content of the page and spit out a related comment probably picked up from another site… Dunno. I doubt it’s done manually but it could be, I suppose…
28 Sep at 12:33 pm
Well, not any more “generic” than any other comments on the post – that is such a small selection of what was said.. But that’s just it, how do we define whether or not its spam? One could say that any commenter only adds their URL to their comments to receive hits on it – how is that any different to said “spammer” commenting on an entry? I have no doubt that these are manual. I think you’d be surprised how much spam is manual – just look at the Digital Point forums and you’ll see teenagers selling their spamability for a few bucks.
28 Sep at 1:03 pm
I’ve seen a few people use their site name instead of their own name as their name in comments which I can understand, but don’t use myself. I’ve had a few people use various URLs on their comments on my site, however I keep an eye on them and if I wasn’t happy linking to a particular site then I’d remove the site but leave the comment. Of course if someone new comes along and expects to be able to leave just one or two comments and then never return then they’re not there to participate, just get a couple of free backlinks with their optimal anchor text and that’s it.
28 Sep at 1:51 pm
I’ve heard lateley that it’s so they can start fooling the spam traps. There’s nothing overtly spammy about it, so if enough people mark it as being legitimate they can start getting more and more through. It’s a whitelisting tactic. I just read an article about it; maybe it was on Digg?
28 Sep at 2:34 pm
Although it’s not technically spam, if it was me then I’d just delete the comments.
28 Sep at 3:51 pm
@Meggan: thanks for the heads up – I’ve taken a look and found this, which I’m guessing you’re on about: http://tinyurl.com/2jmdbu The problem is, the example in that article is very obviously spam. It’s a generic “oh thanks, loved your website” comment. This spam I’m getting isn’t like that. For reference: I know this “new” spam is getting left by hand because I received an email off the guy leaving it asking me why his comments hadn’t been approved.
28 Sep at 4:07 pm
We’re all spamming in a sense then! :S
28 Sep at 4:59 pm
That may be related to the entry, but it sounds a lot like something a Wikipedia page would say. Either way, I used to get comments like this on my old site – I just deleted them. :/
28 Sep at 5:00 pm
You don’t think that a bot produced them so, I’d leave them and remove the URL.
28 Sep at 6:04 pm
I have been getting those to, Jem. Usually, I just check out the web page and if I they are a business or a phony I just delete them. If I don’t have time to check the sites or don’t feel like it I delete them. To me if a person isn’t mature enough to leave their name and url then I don’t need them commenting on my site.
28 Sep at 7:44 pm
And for that reason, I don’t see how you can justify removing it — unless you believe it’s a bot, then that’s a different matter.
28 Sep at 8:24 pm
Well it’s really a person’s decision, if you consider it relevant but not worth of a link page, then why not add a separate category for those comments? And then don’t allow the link to be show for those comments. That way you still get the relevant content but no links for those spammers. Unfortunately though, if spammers are copying from Wikipedia like Mackenzie said, then you would have to remove it. So all in all, hard decision but I think the different categories of comments might help.
28 Sep at 9:20 pm
Yes, these have targeted me as well, I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.
28 Sep at 11:49 pm
I’ve noticed a few of these cropping up on my blog also, and have deleted each and every one of them. Why? I don’t know. It just seems too spam-ish and by allowing these ‘vanilla’ spam comments through Akismet is essentially allowing them to come back and spam me for real with their offers of Viagra and slimming pills. I don’t know, maybe I’m too wary of generic comments.
29 Sep at 12:51 am
I usually just check up on the linked website. If I really can’t find anything fishy, I just approve them. But when I get stupid spam that doesn’t seem spammy, but the link is to a fishy site, I edit out the link, but leave the comment. Though, I haven’t been getting any of those strange, generic comments lately.
29 Sep at 9:54 am
Not necessarily true, Jem. This could also be automated by a bot like the posting of the spam itself. Just wait x days and cURL the page to check for the spam comment, if it isn’t there then fire off an email to the webmaster asking why it isn’t approved. I’ll send you an email with how I think the spammers are doing this particular spamming method. You should be able to understand it easily enough, but I wouldn’t want to give any would-be spammers any tips publicly. :)
29 Sep at 11:32 am
Stephen – as I said in my reply via email, if it was a bot, he did a bloody good job of holding a conversation ;)
29 Sep at 1:02 pm
Only this website could have such a high quality of spam! lol
30 Sep at 2:57 am
I wish I got intelligent spam. Well, I received complements on my site that were spam. They all look like this: “Your site very nice. My site very nice too. You check it my site out? Thanks!!” Throws me off a little but I figure since the URL is usually “cheappharmacy.com/refer/user?=476/id?=viagra” or something of the likes, it’s spam. I’ve never gotten spam that was relevant to my post, though.
30 Sep at 11:05 am
I receive a lot of these too. I delete them right away. Sometimes I am pretty amazed that they are related so well to the entry but I am sure it’s auto generated.
30 Sep at 12:48 pm
I get so so much spam these days, usually the exact same thing over and over…. I wouldn’t actually mind a bit of intelligent spamming for a change!!
01 Oct at 5:59 am
I seem to get a lot of this type of spam on my portfolio website. usually the comment is related to my entry one way another but still seems very spammy, and they always link to their insurance sites-and some to their graphic design blogs full of ads etc. I have no doubt it is manual either-its a linking PR scheme, where people are paid to leave comments to the payers website
15 Oct at 5:37 pm
It’s the new trend. They think that if they write something nice or leave a relevant comment people won’t be as quick to delete their messages as they would normally do if the message read something like ‘buy lot’s of viagra’.
20 Oct at 4:51 pm
I quit it with comments, just killed ’em off. Spam sucks.