Spam sucks. But you know what’s probably worse? Blog comment spam. Yes folks, the spammers have been flooding blogs with their spam, through fake comments. Not new, and I don’t know how long they’ve been at it — probably started not too long after blogging captured the public’s attention and interest — but anyone who blogs knows about the problem…

…or maybe not, judging from all the blogs out there I see that don’t try to stop and/or delete the crap, no doubt something that encourages the spamming bozos to continue with the practice. You just gotta love all these folks, huh?

If you run a WordPress blog, an easy no cost way to deal with the comment spammers is to enable one or more of the comment moderation features the software provides (Settings|Discussion). For my blogs, I usually have them set up to hold everything from new commenters in moderation until I approve them. Yeah, it does take work, especially if one has a popular, active blog, so it shouldn’t be a mystery then why I absolutely positively hate them then… another effing thing to waste time on.

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For the most part, the comment spams are plainly obvious — from posts that are written so poorly by folks who no way in hell could have possibly understood my posts in the first place to blatant adverts to ones that are so totally unrelated to the blog content that obviously some keyword in the post simply confused comment spam autosubmission software… and so on. Sometimes, however, the comment spammers get lucky and manage to pull together words in such a way as to make a comment look legit. Legit enough to approve and let through.

If that happens, good for them. But more often than not, there’s something just a little bit off that’ll make one examine the comment just a little bit more closely, looking for comment spam tells. Again, most you’ll probably catch with no further effort, but there will still be a few that, although not feeling quite right, would for all intents and purposes seem totally legit. Well, Grasshopper, for this last group of comments, there is one free online tool we can use to check and confirm a comment’s validity:

Ye goode olde Google.

Just copy a unique sentence or text string from the comment and paste it into Google’s search field. Voila, instant comment spam check! And frankly, whenever it has reached this Google search point, my comment spam suspicions have always proven positive. Always. But that’s me and my sensibilities… maybe you’ll have a different batting average, but it doesn’t really matter, since the Google search will be quite revealing and conclusive.

What you’re doing here, obviously, is searching the Interwebs for the existence of the text string because, Grasshopper, the comment spammer is quite likely submitting the same exact comment on other blogs. Or other comment spammers using the same exact submission software have also been submitting the same exact comment elsewhere. Or — and this is quite interesting — you may discover the real original source of the content that the comment spammer copied from (e.g., book and product reviews on Amazon!). Whatever, the Google search will be one heck of a last test before you finally click on that Approve button.

Or, you can simply ignore the problem, consider policing the influx as too much work and simply accept and publish all comments that come in. Nah, you’re too responsible and considerate of other bloggers and the Internet community as a whole to do something that silly, right? Well, sadly the Google search technique works because too many folks out there really are that silly.

Sigh.

– EES

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Blogging, spam, tools, wordpress General