Comments without links from spammers
I’ve been getting a certain amount of comments to one of my most spammed posts, and one other. They look like off topic questions without any links whatsoever. But they bear the marks of a Russian spamming crew. The e-mail address is their signature.
Can anyone shed light on their motive?
I suppose it could be a test. It could be comment spam poison. But is it something less obvious? Like trying to get a few approved comments, in order to sail through the approval later on?
November 14th, 2006 at 11:52 pm
I think it is to get a few approved comments. Once the comments are approved, then they may be able to post without moderation.
I got few comments like this from different people but same words. It was obvious that it was spam!
November 15th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
I’ve had a few of these lately, and they made it through on one of my sites. But then I went into Spam Karma and moderated them as spam, and it seems to have caught a few since then. Maybe this will work just the opposite of how the spammers are hoping.
November 15th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
I believe it’s a test to see if a comment goes through without moderation then they proceed to spam it with a URL.
November 23rd, 2006 at 2:12 am
I think it’s just a broken spam bot. If the “URL” field is available (as it is on many blogs), they’ll add the spam there. If it’s not available, they still fill in the other fields and submit the content. It means a bot that may work on most blogs just wastes people’s time on wikis where there never is such a field.
December 10th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
as parially mentionee above…
you have all the wordpress fingerprint in your blog so you will be found if someone is searching for that. Also wordpress by default once a comment is approved you can comment away.
Best practice if your going to set that is to set all comments with >0 links to moderation
December 10th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
I’ve thought it might be an attempt to “whitelist” an IP in Akismet.