Screen Glare

Using WordPress as a CMS has been a God send, but it has also been the devil as Wordpress blogs are often the target of devilish comment spammers. I am both amazed and amused at the creativity of spammers, but of late I have been seeing spam comments on one of my sites that is quite alarming.

It seems that a spammer, or set of spammers, has figure out a way to scrape existing comments on a post, reformat the wording of the comment, and submit it. Honestly, I can spot spam comments a mile away, but these were so relevant that if it wasn’t for the fact that there was too many of them, I would have easily approved all of them. Had a been a less experienced moderator, the spammer would have gotten away with comment auto-approvals on subsequent comments that they post.

Spammers are getting smarter. This is an awesome technique (for a spammer) that I am quite positive will cause many a moderator problems. It isn’t just the technique that has me intrigued, but the idea that spammers, not search engineers, might be the one who lead the semantic web movement - learning context of posts so that they can leave relevant spam comments.