There is nothing like deleting an entire article before posting :/
So what is the point of comment spam anymore? Why post links to websites that don’t exist, or post jibberish text to a weblog? Even if you are posting legit links, who is going to click on them? Ever since WordPress started using the nofollow tag to exclude links from its page rank, posting links all over the place no longer raises that pages rank in the search order, at least as far as Google is concerned. (Is there another search enging even out there?)
For the longest time, a vast majority of spam comments came with some combination of the words “texas”, “holdem”, and “poker”. It is trivial to simply just block posts containing those words. It wasn’t until I was in Seattle and happened to come across the “New York vs. Boston Celebrity Poker Challenge” while scanning the cable for the Weather Channel that I realized how much of a craze holdem has become. What’s next “Exterme Nanny vs. Custom Choppers Celebrity Twin Poker Win-it-All Holdem Challenge Tournament”? Has the gambling craze gone too far. This reporter thinks so.
Recently I have been getting some comments about other gambling games which make it through the basic word filter which WordPress employs. I added those words to the block list and then something dawned on me. Most, if not all of the comments which are peddling products contain the word “online”. I went back to the filter list and added it. No more online-nothing on MY webpage, thank you very much.
I have also employed the Auto Comment Shutoff plugin which turns comments off after a set amount of time. Since I have installed it, my comment moderation queue has gone down from ~200 messages a week to around 30.
One thing that I am toying with as I type this is a blog-style honeypot, which would just serve up an infinite amount of dummy content for the dummy bots to post to. I’d like to design it so that there was a long delay from when the Submit button was fired until the page comes back with a successful “post”. The post would have to be successful so that the bots continue to try to comment on other posts.
