On Spam Comments

As I logged in earlier to write an article, I was greeted with a pretty normal message from Akismet, the free WordPress plugin that makes sure most spam comments just get insta-deleted. Today’s one was somewhat special though.

Akismet has protected your site from 22,000 spam comments already.
There are 194 comments in your spam queue right now.

That’s a lot of comments. Granted, that’s 22,000 comments in over 5 years of Daily SPUF content but that is still a LOT of comments. And I haven’t gotten around to deleting the spam queue in a bit.

The content of most of these comments is what prompts them to be automatically marked as spam. They either have a bunch of URLs in them, advertising something, or they are very obviously copy-pasted bot messages left in a short space of time. Or they cover regularly spammy things, like fake iPhone deals, fake sportswear, things like that. Most of these though are trying to sell shitty SEO services, making comments that look vaguely innocent then saying “oh you could do with some SEO” and either putting a link in or saying to “google their company”.

Yes, I know my SEO skills aren’t amazing, but most of the time these SEO spammers will just stick a link to your website on a very large number of shitty, fake websites, which offers a temporary boost to your rankings… until the search engines find out and completely cock-block you, leaving you far, far worse than before, potentially unable to recover your previous rankings.

Thing is, some of these messages look rather innocent.

Like this one for example:

“I would like to thank you for the efforts you have put in writing this website. I am hoping to check out the same high-grade content from you later on as well. In fact, your creative writing abilities has inspired me to get my very own site now “

Except no, that’s not true at all, because you’ve posted this comment three times under the same name with 3 different fake gmail email accounts, and all three of them have a link to the same website.

Some of these spam comments though are incredibly weird.

Right now there is a weird pattern of spam comments that look like they are from some sort of ARG or something.

“Feel free to transceive the agency at your earliest convenience. No further information until next transmission. This is broadcast #3111. Do not delete.”

These all start with a random name and a random number and ALL of them link to a suspicious-looking website with nothing more than a paper titled “Local quantum energy conditions in non-Lorentz-invariant quantum field theories”. There’s nothing else really on the page, no surveys or anything, it’s just… weird.

The most hated spam comment I’ve seen though is a fucking retarded ramble about how a retard in the US White House recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the fact that RFID microchips exist means that the world will end and if you pray to Jesus, you will be saved. It’s a fucking awful comment and they try to dress it up nicely but seriously, fuck the people who post this. Not only are your arguments done in bad faith and have no basis in reality but you are skewing the words of a book written by a ton of idiots who want to condemn those with different beliefs, all the while taking advantage of the death of someone (who didn’t do all the holy things they claimed) whose only message was “Love others as you love yourself”.

You fucking hypocrites.

Also, fuck the spam comment about duplicate content. This is the Daily SPUF. The whole fucking point of this site is that we publish a new article every day. Your shitty SEO stuff is meaningless.

But what I don’t understand is why people are leaving so many spam comments?

Actually, I do know why. Because while we never see these comments here on the Daily SPUF, while most websites will have something that blocks these comments, there will always be security-lax sites that do allow any and all comments. And considering how cheap and easy it is to set up a bot that will go through WordPress websites and make automatic posts or even just to do it by hand.

It doesn’t matter how many comments are blocked or deleted or whatever. As long as you get one click, one sale, one person fooled, that’s it, it was all worth it.

No one will see the shitty scam links here on the Daily SPUF. Because I make sure of it. But for every Daily SPUF and every other secure website, there’s 10 others where these spam posts are visible. And there’s always some idiot who will click on these links and think they are getting a good deal.

Really though, thank fuck for Akismet. Despite their weird name that always requires me to double-check that it’s spelled right, Akismet does a good job in blocking most of this spam.