We’re Growing, Comrades! The First Spam Bot on My Blog
Today, for the first time since I started this blog, a spam bot left comments here, three times, no less!
I think that’s progress: bots have found out about my blog and got interested in using it for their dirty business. So I’m not writing for nothing, and little by little I’ll make it to the top of the Top 100 :-)
I hope everyone finds something interesting here!
P.S. Sadly, the bot’s mission had to fail: I marked all three comments as spam.
How to spot a spam comment
- generic praise that fits any post: “Great!”, “Thanks, very informative”;
- a link to an unrelated site in the name, in the “Website” field or in the text itself;
- several similar comments in a row under different names;
- text that has nothing to do with the post.
It’s better not to approve such comments but to mark them as spam: Akismet, the anti-spam plugin that comes with WordPress, learns from these marks and filters similar ones on its own next time. In the discussion settings, you can also turn on a rule so that a new author’s first comment waits for manual approval.