Sorry, Bub.
So Akismet had this comment from “steve” on my post about the X-Men III trailer sitting in moderation [links removed]:
The 7 minutes x-men trailers did show Wolverine move. It is cool. cannot wait until it coming out
x-men will be a good movie. cannot wait until it coming out. Do you guys think there will be another x-men?
I starred it in Gmail as something to come back to as it was a little fishy, but i didn’t have time to look into it then. So tonight i cleared out my moderation queue, and went ahead and approved the comment. I was even about to reply comment, but paused for a second. The email address appeared to be real, and the linked site looked legit, “human”—real, fresh content. But it somehow lacked personality. And of course there was the illiterate writing in the comment, and the fact that x-men was linked twice to the same post about the movie on that site.
So Googling the comment text brought up many hits of the exact same comment on other sites with posts about the X-Men movie. Some even with short “hand-written” additions for that personal touch. I also found similar mass-comments linking to other posts on that site.
Look, steve, even if you posted all those comments by hand, you didn’t have the sincerity to write original thoughts—actual comments—about those posts. Copy-pasting links to your site ain’t gonna fly around here. If it smells like spam, it probably tastes like spam. And i’m not biting.
The more sophisticated the spam prevention tools get, the more sophisticated the spammers get. Until people stop buying, they’ll just keep coming. And the recent Blue Security debacle is frightening.
But maybe I’m just a little discouraged from too much moderation and filtering.
By the way, long time no see. Hello again. =)
That’s pretty nefarious of them. Despite the weird grammar I would have approved that comment without a second thought and assumed it was an innocent one from someone who wasn’t a native speaker of English. It’s certainly more believeable than the numerous brazen “gay porn here” spam comments that I get inundated with.
Good job to the Akismet developers nonetheless. Their program managed to spot it.
And amazingly, shortly after this was posted, a “hand-written” spam comment on this post was moderated. Here’s the first line:
I won’t bother posting the rest—you can find the same comment elsewhere on Google. Same formula as before: apparently hand-written, but bombed all over the place—even if it’s irrelevant.
They’re obviously just whoring for a link. But it’s tricky because they don’t submit their website URL, and instead just leave a link in the comment, and they sometimes vary the spelling of their name or add a few extra relevance cues to the comment to further the hand-written illusion.