Wordpress Spam Lives On!

I’ve always wondered:

“What type of idiot would actually think he can get away by posting spam comments with 10 links to different websites?”

The answer, is anyone.

I was quite suprised to find this rather obvious spam post on CopyBlogger:

User Cialis (nice exotic name, lol…) posted about how the comments on the blog were not related to the post, then continued to list a couple of websites that he / she thought the rest of the world needed to know about.

This is probably the oldest trick in the book when it comes to Wordpress spam, but it still works simply because:

• Even the best apam filters sometimes let a few spam comments slip in
• For larger sites, the admin usually doesn’t approve comments manually or even reads the comments at all.
• Most people don’t really configure the spam trigger words which could have easily solved this problem

Spammers go for bulk. They spam thousands of Wordpress blogs on a daily basis and if even one attempt breaks through to a popular blog like CopyBlogger, and stays there for a long period of time undetected, then their efforts are worth it.

So we come down to the basic question of “Why do people still spam?”

Because it still works.

Plugins like Akismet and Spam Karma are great but nothing solves spam 100%, especially when some of the spammers themselves are well-versed with how these plugins work.

If you want to make sure embarassing spam comments don’t show up on your blog, go to Option > Discussion in your WP dashboard and enter a few common spam words in the trigger filter.

This should solve a lot of unwanted attention.

Tagged as: blog, blogging