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could comment spam be targeted?

  1. motre
    Member

    I was away for a while on a big work project (not yet done, but slowing down, now) and came back to my WP blog and noticed a pile of comment spam in the spam queue. Good for akismet for catching it all.

    But I'm curious. It seems almost all of the comment spam has targeted 2 specific posts. Both posts are about banks doing bad things. I closed comments early on the first one, so the spammers can't post at all. Now the next one is being targeted.

    Any ideas from anyone why these posts would be specifically targeted? Is "bank" a popular attractor for comment spammers? Or am I being too paranoid when I think about the idea that the banking industry is pushing this spam, somehow?

    The blog I need help with is blog.motre.net.

  2. jessielansdel
    Member

    I have had spam about products on totally un related posts. For example, an advert for Viagra on a photo of my 6 month old niece (which I thought was very inappropriate) and adverts for electronic cigarettes on photos of cats.

  3. mistressneko
    Member

    Comment Spam can be strange..... I usually only get 1 or 2 a month tied to any one particular post. But....

    Then my last post gets 44 in just under a day.... there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. I just assume that the spammers come and go in waves, hammering away until they see no results, only to pop back up at some later time to try again.

  4. motre
    Member

    What seemed funny is they pick a post and try to comment heavily on that one for weeks, and ignore many others. I was curious why the first one I did about a bank was picked, and had over weeks many spam comments constantly, a few a day while very little other spam comments came in. It stopped when I closed comments on that one post. Then I posted another about another bank, and the comment spam started up on it. So now I am wondering.

    It may be due to specific keywords they look for. I don't have a lot of readers (yet), so that's probably not related. They likely have no way to know. The post may have been picked up by more of those aggregators.

  5. raincoaster
    Member

    What generally happens is, they spam your blog and anywhere you do not delete the spam just screams "PUT MORE SPAM HERE, WOOHOO" and so they hammer those threads. They also target certain keywords. Try blogging about Forex and see what happens.

  6. mistressneko
    Member

    They've got to be strange keywords then....

    The current blitz I'm seeing is all for a movie review of an obscure Turkish horror film. Not a single bit of spam on any of my nearly 500+ posts.... just that one.

    Mind you... it was my most recent posting, but it couldn't be that simple could it? I posted something new just this afternoon and they are still smacking away on the original target.

    .... Silly spammers....

  7. raincoaster
    Member

    Yes, it could be that simple. Spam always increases on the weekends, to take advantage of lower security staffing levels. A spammer got by me today as well. Just mark them as spam and soon Akismet will catch on.

  8. motre
    Member

    Akismet has caught all the spam for me on the two "bank" related posts. Nothing has gotten through. I just don't see how those could be targeted and not others besides that word "bank" in there. Maybe there is another word. But still, a word?

    Of course if I turn comments off, none are posted. But I don't know if they are trying by at least fetching the post.

  9. mistressneko
    Member

    Hmmmm? I know one thing I'd like to see implemented....

    Viewing stats on any single post suggests that much of my spam comes from one single page visit/view at a time. The Spammer opens my full post, and then makes 10+ comments with that single page view. Couldn't the number of comments allowed per view be limited?

    At least that way they'd have to click away and back before dropping another spam comment and it shouldn't affect real visitors or commenter.

  10. motre
    Member

    Are they making those 10+ comments from the same IP address?

  11. mistressneko
    Member

    No... those are all slightly different, but I can't figure that out since the number of spam always seems to way outnumber the page views for that posting.

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