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How do I know if comments are spam?

  1. robgorrell
    Inactive

    Hi. I have 16 comments in my spam folder. I would guess by looking that all but two or three are spammish comments, unrelated to blog, horrible spelling and grammer. But a couple might be nice comments.

    Is there a way to know?

    Thanks,

    Rob
    robgorrell.com

  2. timethief
    Member

    Do the comments directly relate to the content in the posts they were submitted to?
    Do the URLs of the comments indicate they are associated with commercial domains?
    Do the comments contain words that indicate they came from came from spam factories (acne prevention, viagra, casino, gambling, buy drugs online, groupon, make money)?
    Are the comments submitted to older posts? Older posts are a target for spam. You can set your wordpress.com blog up on that same Page to cope with this. Automatically close comments on articles older than ___days.

  3. timethief
    Member

    Oops! I forgot to identify which page I mean above. > Settings > Discussion

    I've been a blogger for 6 years now so I find it quite easy to identify bot generated and human generated spam. As you are new to blogging if the comment does not directly relate to the content of the post then I would not approve it.

  4. jmadlc55
    Inactive

    Thanks, timethief!

    I've been getting some comments the last few days which fit your description above. I was suspicious because all of them have only one misspelled word in them. The misspelled word seems so obvious that it looks like it's done on purpose although I can't point my finger on why these commenters would benefit if their comment was approved.

    Also, the originating email address looks like an exotic location (baltikum@terraincognita.lt or[email redacted])

    Jesus
    cubiyanqui.com

  5. raincoaster
    Member

    The reason they misspell one word is so they can track the comments later across the blogosphere.

  6. jmadlc55
    Inactive

    I see, raincoaster.

    Are they looking to place a comment so that other commenters or anyone reading their comment -- including the blogger -- will click on their name and be led to a page or product pitch?

    Or is the intent much more malevolent?

  7. raincoaster
    Member

    Usually they just want your eyeballs to go to the site that's paying them, but about 1/100 times it goes to a site that deliberately loads malware, viruses, etc onto your computer. Don't visit those sites. If you see a comment you can't make up your mind about, set it as Pending Approval and let it sit for awhile. There's no rush to post it.

  8. jmadlc55
    Inactive

    Thanks. That's very helpful.

  9. robgorrell
    Inactive

    Makes sense. Thanks for the help. I got about 10 more comments in my spam box overnight. They all have the misspelled odd word. I'm glad WordPress has the spam catcher built in.

  10. timethief
    Member

    We are all glad we have Akismet. :)

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