It appears that blog comment spam is getting much better.
For those not aware, spammers are busy trying to get their links onto “good” sites. If a blog is considered a good site, and apparently this one is by some metric, spammers will flood the comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks in order to show links to their site. This is done purely to increase the rank of the target site in search engines. If it weren’t for anti-spam tools like Askimet, comments and the like would most likely be a thing of the past, as bloggers wouldn’t be able to keep up with the deluge.
On my comment stream, I require moderation for all comments. The way WordPress implements this is that once an author is “approved” by me, then they’re free to continue to post whatever. Spammers have now figured that out. Consider the following comment on my recent post about goldfish:
goldfish need lots and lots of water just for themselves. they can get extremely large and are very messy fish. they require water with a whole lot of oxygen, so the more surface agitation, the better! lots of air pumps!
OK, kinda random, but seems to be a legit comment… or is it? Turns out the same name / IP posted the following on my old post about Rhapsody:
does rhapsody still exists ??
Again, seems to be a legit comment in isolation. Far better than the more common bait comments, like:
Hello, my name is Alfred, i’m a newbie here. I really do like your forum and really interested in things you discuss here, also would like to enter your community, hope it is possible:-) Cya around, best regards, Alfred!
So, we’ve moved from generic “I like your site!” to semi-legit responses to keywords. They’re getting a bit smarter… blast. And I really don’t want to have to require people to answer a captcha or something similar to prove they’re a person and not a robot.