Long tail spam

As you probably know, Eightbar runs on WordPress. Akismet is a pretty good spam filter. Viagra, casinos and all manner of unspeakable nastiness and vile unpleasantness has no chance of getting though. On the other hand, how can I expect it to spot and handle comment spam such as this one we received this morning…

This site contains relevant information about irregular verb french.

Yes, those pesky spammers, realising spam filters are too clever for them, have begun harnessing the power of niche spam. Or, as Tim O’Reilly might nauseatingly put it “monetizing the long tail“.

Today we’ve had all of these make it through Akismet and into the comments:

  • irregular verb french
  • world of jewels category
  • knitting pattern for sweater
  • steam turbine
  • scratching with long nail
  • cochlear implant controversy

some of which are amusingly eclectic and downright odd (I particularly grinned at the first and the last in the list).

Meanwhile, Akismet did manage to catch:

  • transnational bus malaysia
  • rest area usa
  • girlie lake
  • professional resume writing services
  • Reviews on drilling through brick wall
  • Delete this spam!

So there is hope yet. The last one, I think, was not really trying very hard though.

So, my apologies if you see the odd bit of comment spam in Eightbar. I hope it is at least weird enough to make you smile.

3 thoughts on “Long tail spam

  1. As an owner of more than a handful of WP sites, I rely solely on Spam Karma 2 (http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/) which may be more aggressive than Askiment, but has rarely let me down. I think there is even a plugin to make the work together.

    My own howling at the moon is that Google’s page rank provides a financial incentive for blog spammers, putting a burden of spam filtering on individual blog owners, some of whom resign to shutting off comment features. How is that fit with “do no evil”?

  2. I was expecting lots of pills and genital enhancements, but we seem to get lots of stuff about various makes of cars, as well as “Hello”, “Good”, “nice” and “please”. We’ve had a WP site running for about a year, and have recently swapped over to Radiant (and moved comments over- 99% spam)

    You can see my graphs in this post: http://redant.com.au/blog/whats-in-your-spamtail/

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