How To Identify a Smart Spam Comment

Posted on April 21, 2009
Filed Under Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Spams. Everyone hates one. But the fact is that spams are everywhere. As I have mentioned previously, I got spammed pretty badly on my browser post. So, today is not an exception. I got another list of spam comments in my spam queue after they got filtered by Mr. Akismet. There was one spam that caught my attention which gave me the idea to write this post. It’s a smarter spam. I’ll share with you how to identify and catch one.

Let’s have a look at the more common comment spam first.

As you can see, usually a common spam comment will contain lots of thrashy words and links to all sorts of sites. That can be easily identified by anyone and have that spam comment deleted right away, right?

Next, the smarter spam. Check it out:

As you can see above, the spammer is pretty smart. He made the message like a normal message with just a single link. He tried to convince the unsuspecting reader that it’s not a spam by saying “PS. Dont be an ass, this is NOT spam”. So, how do you confirm that it’s a spam? Simple. Just take the highlighted sentence and do a search with Mr. Google.

You can see above in the search results that there are a lot of identical comment phrases in other blogs. You can also get lots of identical results if you do an advanced search with Mr. Google. Could it be just sheer coincidence? Of course not … unless the spam message speaks Hokkien (a Chinese dialect). When that happens I might have to look further LOL.

With that, you can safely confirm that this is a spam comment and have it deleted.

After catching this kind of spams a few times, you’ll be able to identify a spam comment better and have it deleted faster by just looking at them.

Technorati Tags: spam, spam tactic, spam comment, identify spam

Comments

8 Responses to “How To Identify a Smart Spam Comment”

Cher on April 21st, 2009 1:16 am

How about those spams that are apparently from someone who just wanted to promote their blogs? The blogs I’m talking about are the normal personal blogs, which owners desire for more traffic, hence simply leave a comment or chat without forgetting the links to their own blogs? Honestly&personally, those are pretty annoying too. My 2 cent.

blurryleo: { well, since that you made the comment above, I assume that you can tell them out easily. You can always choose to have your comments moderated. If you find that annoying and do not wish for those to be displayed, just disapprove and have it deleted }
Superman on April 21st, 2009 1:18 am

What happens if you received lots of spam comment like that? Search them one by one?

blurryleo: { well, usually spams are almost the same. either they have too many links or they will contain comment that is totally irrelevant to what you have posted. that will be a good way to do a first parse of filtering }
Cher on April 21st, 2009 2:30 am

Thanks for the reply I’m thinking of spreading the awareness to other bloggers who always do that. The art of blogging could be appreciated more if they could appreciate the content of the blog and not making it a tool to for self publicity. Yes I can tell them out, but it may make me seem unfriendly by rejecting their comments. sigh, shouldn’t have given it a damn, should I? But more importantly is still, the bloggers themselves should know the ethic. They can write craps in their own blogs, but make it constructive while commenting.

blurryleo: { agreed. well, things like those happen. It’s rather out of our control in a way. we can just hope that as time goes by, readers will learn to make constructive and meaningful comments . have a great day. }
Cher on April 21st, 2009 2:36 am

*sorry, would like to clarify*
… constructive while commenting in other blogger’s territory.
calvaryzone on April 21st, 2009 10:19 am

you have got to give credit to those creative and evolving spammers. they are afterall, just trying to beat the system.

blurryleo: { LOL … that’s a good one cal … Should have a “world spammers day”, eh .. j/k }
Caffery on April 21st, 2009 11:17 am

I simply hates those blog that (automatically?) keep on collecting lot of blog posts, pings to them.

Then may be few months later, the blog no more exist.

And some of the spam just got a link on the Website field, the content is just normal (without any link), and might be fit well with your topic.

blurryleo: { hey Caffery, thanks for dropping by. yep I agree with you. I got quite a number of those pingbacks too whenever the posts I did matched their ‘requirements’. Very annoying. I usually have those removed instantaneously. }
Money4Invest | Lee on June 3rd, 2009 4:41 pm

I received some spam comments as well and some of them just passed through the askimet plugin. Luckily I still can manage to catch and delete them away.

blurryleo: { yea, some of those smarter ones can still escape akismet. but those have yet to escape me .. hehehe }
Marielle Garcia on July 16th, 2009 10:59 pm

Hi…

I just want to drop by to tell you that his post is really really helpful. I’ve been getting alot of spam comments, and I just realized they were spam when I read your article. =D I did a post about it on my blog as well. And I linked back to this post for them to read further more about it. Keep it up

Marielle

blurryleo: { Hi Marielle, I’m glad that the post helped you out. }