On one of my sorties through the Comments tab in my dashboard, I found a comment which looked very familiar. It looked and felt like a comment I wrote myself. So, I copied the whole comment and had it searched at google. Lo and behold, it returned just one item which lead me to a blog which happened to be in my list of favorite blogs which I visit regularly. There, I got confirmation to my hunch. It was indeed a comment written by me.
That same comment was used by a commenter in the comments section of one of my posts. I would have taken no notice had the comment’s content been directly related to my post in question. Nope! Is there a plugin that can automatically stop a copy-pasted comment like this?
There’s also these commenters whose comments blares ‘spammer’ very loudly. The comments sometimes contain a url and when I searched out the whole comment strings in google, it returns several blogs on which the same comment had been posted word for word too. One of these spamming urls brings you to a french website. And speaking of French, what should I do to a comment made wholy in French? Sorry, as I don’t speak a word of French, I trash it.
Some spammers here probably think I don’t read the comments prior to having them approved. Like I said, comments are still manageable, in fact they’re few. They write a sentence and then make their comment appear longer by copy-pasting a sentence or two from the post itself.
“Exactly what i was looking for!” This very happy comment is so wide-eyed retarded I trash it without second thought.
Although I used some plugins, e.g. captcha free, to filter out comments submitted by automation software, manual spamming is something that (my newbie mind thinks) has to be caught manually too. Now, this I believe could only be possibly done with blogs that only receives a manageable number of comments like mine. Perhaps these spammers that utilize the cut and paste method of comment writing should target only the more established blogs, especially those that receive comments per post in the hundreds or more. There’s your tip. If you’re this kind of spammer, you may get back to my blog after a few more years when my blog hopefully becomes so cool that it attracts comments in the thousands, when I couldn’t anymore handle manual checking. Looks like it’s going to be a very long wait because I don’t see myself becoming an ‘A’ blogger, pro-blogger, whatever it’s called, soon.
Among the latest comments, I found one which said something about Akismet being a plugin which has a “flaw“of putting a spammer’s url on a blacklist which is then accessible by all Akismet users. Well, I kinda like this “flaw“*. For some newbie-minded reason, I haven’t installed the Akismet plugin, despite the recommendations of very established plugins, thinking that the anti-spam plugins which I use may be enough (or may conflict with each other). Well, after knowing about the flaw, I think it’s time to have it installed.
After writing this spur-of-the-moment post, I began to search about this subject in the net and found some interesting posts like the ones from Urban Semiotic and hem.com.
* On second thought, I think this flaw needs to be corrected, because anyone could use it to destroy the backlinking efforts of his competitors!
May 14, 2010 Update: Finally installed Akismet. 🙂