"SPAM: So good…it’s gone"

If only Hormel’s slogan for their canned meat were true for its Internet namesake.

Randy Charles Morin, “State of the Splogosphere, Part III” notes:

There’s a new evil in the blogosphere and that’s blog comment SPAM. The amount of blog comment SPAM is not only increasing, but the spammers are writing relevant comments that are less likely to get removed by the blog’s author.

Right you are, Randy Charles. In an earlier post I outlined my approach for stopping spomments, which was to limit url links to three. After implementing this barrier, I also found a large number of spomments that included href tags or just plain text url’s (even though they weren’t rendered as live links), so I limited the total number of occurrences of “http://” to six. Then, to monitor my success and to catch any draconian denials, I added code to send myself an e-mail whenever a comment was denied. I immediately began enjoying receiving and reviewing these e-mails, laughing in wicked glee as my inbox filled up with messages containing the subject “COMMENT DENIED”. I still enjoy those.

But, within a few hours, I also started to get notifications of accepted comments from some of the very same spammers. They had almost instantaneously recognized my approach and adapted their SPAM engines accordingly. Now they were posting comments that had exactly three links each. Fortunately, these haven’t escalated to the point where I have to spend tons of time removing them, but I need to come up with a plan before that happens.

Another thing I noticed recently that Morin also mentions: SPAM comments that read something like “Nice work! Here’s my homepage” followed by the text “Homepage” that’s linked to the spammer’s target site. These spomments require careful examination to recognize that they’re SPAM. If they start coming in large numbers, I’ll be likely to hurriedly delete some real comments that fail to make an impression with their content.

Sorry, Hormel. I’ll never be a member of the SPAM Fan Club.