There is a bit of a thrill when you open up your Manage Comments admin page in WordPress and you see a list of comments waiting for you that say “Wow, like your site and I’ll be back” and “I learned a lot here and I’m glad you made this site”, or my personal favorite, “Wow, this is a great web site. I am so glad I found it, thank you. It is funny, I was just talking to my friend about their web site, and they said they like your site too!” How shocking was it to find out that most of these are bullshit.
That’s right! Comment spam crap, right out of the old spamming game crap. Just when I was getting a bit of a swelled head, I started realizing that these sounded familiar. A little searching turned up zengun » the automated guestbook, a list of one person’s collection of polite and kind comments left by comment spammers.
If you don’t know what a comment spammer is, it is typically a robot, spider, or script that crawls through the web looking for comment forms. Trust me, a single person didn’t stop by and visit your site and say “Wow, this is cool!” for fun. It was machine coding and it is leaving a link with words that will lull you into a false sense of “niceness” unlike the more nasty online gamming casinos and viagra pushers, so you will allow the link within their name to stay on your site, unconciously promoting their evil wiles.
Spammers are in a race to outwit even the smartest programmers, and those of us who open ourselves up to the world via email, comments on our site, and, well, just about everything we do online, are at risk from these evil time wasting monsters.
So next time your head swells a little from the nice comments on your site, let it swell, than look again and see if there is something suspicious about the link…..it could be someone really being nice, or it could be comment spam crap.
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