Some spam is getting harder to filter | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 5:47 pm – February 1, 2013 by Invest It Wisely

Have you guys noticed this? I'm getting more and more commentators that are leaving some decent comments, but when I look at the comment closely it seems to be a copy/paste template, and often the name and email won't match, or there will be other tell-tale signs. I'll then look at the website and the website doesn't quite match what I saw in the email or name.

It's getting tougher to filter some of these out. I see this a lot, actually, where I had a flood of spam comments from pages linking to facebook users, and they were all bashing a particular product. Then I get some that seem ALMOST related, but not quite — as if the guy read the title and a few paragraphs and then wrote whatever. These seem to be the real human spammers and not the robots. Tougher to identify and keep them out.

I've noticed the same thing, Kevin.  Some of the comments are good, even with gravatars. It's a time grinder for sure.

I've been getting a ridiculous amount of spam lately and it's similar to what you're describing. I send it to the trash but I'd love if it was caught ahead of time. It's hard to filter out!

savvyscot said:

Me too – but I have to sort through the spam folder. For every 20 spam comments there is one that is legit. Some of the templates are fantastic they are using – I am finding a lot are coming from Facebook these days?

If you use Akismet, add Conditional Captcha. That will help a huge deal with both the robot spammers and with legit comments.

Haha! Starbucks's should have a company policy against serving spammers

Van Beek @ Stock Trend Investing said:

I am not that familiar with Wordpress but one one of my Wordpress sites I get for one particular posts a lot of trackbacks that look like if they have linked to me. But when I check the URLs where these "trackbacks" are coming from, these are all home pages of commercial sites that have nothing to do with my blog post.

What plugin do you use to filter those out as spam (now they end up in my moderation queue) or how do you handle this? 

I hate these too — that stupid "related sites" plugin that they run. It's not even a followed link. I don't know of a plugin that checks both that the page contains a link to your site and that it is not a "nofollow" link. If you find one, please let me know. :)

savvyscot said:

Me too – but I have to sort through the spam folder. For every 20 spam comments there is one that is legit. Some of the templates are fantastic they are using – I am finding a lot are coming from Facebook these days?

I have been getting tonnes of spam comments from Facebook profiles too. The comments sound legitimate for a bit but there are words spelled badly wrong and then I look at the profile and there will be 2 friends or something. I have to go through my spam folder once before I empty it just to make sure that I didn't accidentally delete a real comment.

I received 50 in a day and decided to turn on moderation for all comments and Akismet. Since then, it stopped mostly. I haven't had to add Conditional Captcha yet.