Saturday, March 17, 2007

Great Moments in Spam Irony

Akismet continues to hand spammers their arse on a platter, much to my delight. Their approach seems to have changed a while ago, instead of letting me see the hundreds of spam comments it was catching each day, they seem to be blocking them at the server with a few slipping through to be caught and a very small number actually reaching blog posts before I delete them manually.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I can imagine dealing with spam without a tool like Akismet. To give you a sense of scale, I reached 1,000 legitimate comments and 1,000 spam comments at about the same time. Currently, I'm at about 4,000 legitimate comments and Akismet is reporting that it's blocked 43,000 spam comments. Based on the rate spam was arriving before they started blocking them at the server, the real number Akismet has blocked would be over 70,000. Forget outnumbering real comments, I thought at one point that spam was going to outstrip actual views.

Every now and then, the comment spam gets put into a moderation queue and today the combination of spam and post in the moderation queue gave me a bit of a laugh. Back when I started getting really assaulted by comment spam, several hundred a day, I decided I wasn't going to always check through the massive list of blocked comments looking for false positives. I announced this in a post titled "I deleted your comment because I hate you."

You guessed it, today (for the first time as far as I can remember) I deleted a spam comment that landed on the "I deleted your comment because I hate you" post. I know it was sent by a bot but I really was tempted to send a reply saying "Hey fuckwad, in your case, I deleted your comment because I really, really fucking hate you."

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