comment spam update

Well, sure enough, a few minutes after I posted the last comment on the trafficsynergy blog about comment spam, there was another posting which was a comment spam. Now, I can’t believe that someone would read the posting about comment spam, and then comment spam the posting! So I looked at the composition of the comment spam posting.

 

It read as follows:

 

“Your blog is thorough If you have a weight issue, I'm sure you'd be interested in xenical diet purchasing xenical diet”

 

It suddenly hit me that the comment spam was computer generated. I’ve looked at blog software before for generating blog postings, and it is useful in very specific cases, as you don’t want to create blogs with meaningless information. But this is different – this is software that creates comment spam on new blog postings. So I’m assuming what it does is it finds a list of blogs with new entries, and then adds a preformatted message like the one above (I took out the hyperlink from the comment spam above, as I don’t want it to gain any page rank).

 

Anyway, I’m now testing a new feature on the blogger software called “word verification” which means that you have to type in a sequence of letters and numbers before you can post your comment – this will prevent automatic scripts like the one which I believe is being used for the above posting from “littering” the traffic synergy blog with meaningless comment spam. So any comment spam which now appears on the traffic synergy blog will actually have been entered by a real live human being!