Simon’s Blog

Comment spammers are interested in one thing: money. They have been able to make significant sums of money from pushing up the rankings of their affiliate porn and gambling web-sites on search engines. They do this by putting links to their web-sites in their comments.

Now, I’m not surprised comment spammers do what they do: there’s no shortage of single-brain-celled low-life on the planet, after all. However, I’m a little bit surprised comment spamming still works. Modern blog software - like the excellent Wordpress - has built-in tools and plug-ins available that are pretty effective at dealing with blog comment spam. The reason why these tools can be pretty effective is that it’s not a hard problem to solve. Simply making any comment with a link (or two or three) in it require moderation pretty much fixes the problem; and lists of blacklisted sites are useful too. Problem solved.
And as for moderating the comments, well in Wordpress it’s a simple process: quick glance down the list; click to mark all comments as spam; delete; done. It takes all of 5 seconds.

I suppose there are still lot of blogs out there which don’t have great anti-spam tools, which is why it’s still worth the spammers time to do this. But the trend is clear: the days of blog comment spam are numbered.

So - to all you single-brain-celled low-life comment spammers out there - I wish you a Happy Christmas! But let’s hope that by next Christmas, your revenue streams have dried up.