Quotulatiousness

July 14, 2012

Everyone running a WordPress blog should recognize these

Filed under: Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:03

Cory Doctorow at boingboing on the most common type of spam comment encountered on a WordPress blog (like Quotulatiousness):

This morning, I woke up to find that someone who was new to the tool (or unclear on the concept) had left a spam with all of the default comment messages in it, dumping the full database of anodyne comments intended to fool both the spam-filter and the human operator into thinking that the sender had read the post and was replying to it. The comments are necessarily generic, as they are meant to apply to literally any WordPress post on any site, ever. I wonder if the poor grammar and odd phrasing is deliberate, intended to make human moderators less suspicious and to lead them to think that some earnest foreigner is trying desperately to compliment them across the language barrier.

The comments also tend to invite replies, with mild complaints about RSS errors and layout problems. They mention spouses, cousins and friends. All in all, they’re a curious collection of spammers’ hypotheses about what will appeal to the vanity and goodwill of people who run legitimate WP sites.

I usually start my blogging day by quickly scanning through 20-30 of these, just in case some poor human’s comment got caught by the spamcatcher (it’s vanishingly rare for this to happen, in my experience).

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress