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Jeff Chandler

New Holiday – Talk Like a Spammer Day!

WPForce Logo Jonathan Dingman over at WPForce.com has published a funny piece that illustrates how comment spammers are able to be so randomly creative with their posts. One of his spam comments contained the entire template of text used to generate random comments. How many combinations of spam can you make with the following template?

I {want to|wish to|desire to} read {more|even more} things about it!|
{It is|It’s} {appropriate|perfect|the best} time to make {a few|some} plans
for {the future|the longer term|the long run} and {it is|it’s} time to be happy.

Check out the long list of different replies on his post. I think this calls for a new holiday. Talk like a spammer day! We humans have to guess which combination is the correct one! But giving this some more thought, if there was a talk like a spammer day and we were legitimately using templates like the ones presented in the post to generate our comments and those comments were published even though Akismet thinks they are spam, how big of an impact would we have on screwing up the Akismet spam algorithm? Maybe this holiday is not such a good idea!

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8 responses to “New Holiday – Talk Like a Spammer Day!”

  3. Thanks Viki, I think I’ve met everyone of those guys- more times than I care to think about…

    I had one once that was kind of interesting , He was based in the UK, selling batteries, but he actually took time to write comments that were on topic and made sense, followed by a sales pitch. I let him keep coming back for a couple weeks, until the sales pitch and link started becoming the entire comment, Then I dumped his IP in the pit..

    I hear there’s a Ugg Boot outlet in Orlando, Some day I think I’ll pay ’em a visit, with 100 or so other bloggers

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  4. No thanks, I get enough of the real thing. No need to encourage more. ;)

    On a side note, it’s amazing how many sites I see with spam comments. I’m not talking about small sites either, I’m talking about large, well known sites. The admins have removed the link from the commenter’s name but have allowed the comment to stand. I suppose they think it’s cute – I think it looks ridiculous.

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  6. @Len – I’ve come across many with open comments and no admin at all. One got hit by a Reddit / 4chan battle a while ago – an old post – and the battle raged for a whole day before I sent the owners a quiet note and they removed all the offending posts. Comments are, however, still open to all.

    I can understand why some simply remove the link: more comments makes a site seem popular. I’ve noticed that spam commenters don’t register as a hit with my visits on Google Analytics and so on, perhaps that makes a difference too?

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  7. @Viktoria Michaelis –

    Depending on how important traffic from France, or wherever the IPs lives is to your site and to you personally, You can block entire countries. With WHM it can be done directly through the control panel- get your host to walk you through it..I don’t know about systems

    The premium version of the Word Fence plugin allows you to do it from you WP dashboard. I had some issues with the Premium Word Fence, so pick a time when it’s slow in case there’s a conflict and you have to disable the plugin..

    There are several countries I no longer hear from

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  8. @Len – Yep. I’ve seen some large well known sites with comments just like the ones in Viktoria’s post. I guess no one is paying attention or is too busy to delete them.

    @Viktoria Michaelis – I’ve received comments that are spot on in terms of being relevant to the article they are responding two but I’ve had to delete their link because it’s to some spam site or marketing space. So I end up leaving the comment text but deleting the URL so I get the last laugh.

    @Grumpy – What’s that like? To silence entire countries?

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