TnT Unleashed 1pic4twenty Blog

 

Gee, we simply cannot believe what some spammers think we are going to allow through on this blog! Are spammers from another planet? Don’t they get it? Or are all these ridiculous blog spam comments coming from some automated system? If so, who invented these automated systems? Absolutely ridiculous!

Or is all this spam from desperate people employed by legitimate companies or businesses or people trying to get their blog or site linked to from all over the Internet. If so, they (the people that did the employing) need to check on what the people they employ and pay are doing! (Besides giving their business a bad name!) If people are being paid to leave blog comments all over the Internet, they should be excellent writers who know what they’re doing, and who actually read the blog posts before leaving a comment – comments should be fairly long, and contribute further to the post.

If the owners of companies paying people to leave their links all over the place don’t really care if comments seem like spam, or aren’t at all related to the blog posts or articles – or if the companies themselves are running around the Internet leaving silly comments on other people’s sites, then they (or their companies) deserve to get a bad name or reputation.

Akismet, in particular, does a great job keeping many of the spam comments from appearing on blogs, but they still sit there in our moderation queue, and take up space on our server, until we go through them and delete them. We will always use moderation on our blog, as our blog is family friendly and many of the spam comments that we find in the moderation queue are certainly not family friendly, or they have links displayed that link to sites that are not family friendly.

If many of the comments that are landing up on our blog (in the moderation queue) are NOT from automated systems, then it’s amazing to realise that a lot of people out there must certainly have a few screws loose in their heads – how can they possibly believe that we (and many other savvy blog owners) will actually allow their silly and unrelated, and often totally irrelevant and obviously spam comments to appear? Okay, okay, sometimes we give these so called bloggers the benefit of the doubt, if they really tried quite hard to conceal the fact that they’re actually just spamming, and we let their comments through – but this is often like saying: “hey, we liked your comment, so please send another 1000 similar ones, okay?” (which is certainly not ideal, is it?) So, it’s a tricky situation at times, and most of the time is just downright irritating and seems to be an unbelievable waste of time! (moderating comments, allowing some through, or these “bloggers” taking the time to run around the Internet getting their comments rejected.)

Here are some scenarios or situations, or types of spammers, even a few examples of what we consider spam (and what Akismet considers spam too, clever thing that it is):

EXAMPLE ONE
Spammer type: trying to make the blog owner feel good
example: What insight! I wish I had your writing skills! You know just how to deal with this subject, and portray it and solutions perfectly!
giveaway: a name like “get movies for free here”

Note: if any spammers out there are planning on using this, be warned, we made up the above comment ourselves, so if spam savvy bloggers see it somewhere, and here too, they’ll know you just copied it from us!

EXAMPLE TWO
A whole string of links or words or sentences that make no sense at all

EXAMPLE THREE
“I absolutely love this post and am going to subscibe or follow you” (and stats show no new followers or subscribers)

EXAMPLE FOUR
The spammer mentions a subject in your blog post, saying how they agree or disagree, but there’s absolutely nothing on that subject in the article or blog post!

EXAMPLE FIVE
Spammer type: a bit like the spammer type in example one above – he or she was “searching for something” (and they mention the item, service or website they themselves are trying to promote) and they “came across” your site! Wow, makes you feel good – your site or blog post is “out there” getting found! (Yeah right!)
Giveaway: The items or words they mention don’t actually appear in your blog post, or the site they link to or their “name” is also the item they were “searching for.”

EXAMPLE SIX
“Awesome movie! I watched it for free!” (on a blog post about web design terms and conditions.)

EXAMPLE SEVEN
Various comments that have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the blog post or article:

- What is the last aircraft?
(we don’t care about the last aircraft especially when it has nothing to do with our blog post!)

- Hi, it looks like your site
(What does? Our site looks like our site? Of course it does, and you’re on it and it’s ours, and it wow, hang on, yeah, IT LOOKS LIKE OUR SITE! – perhaps we should have let that one through?)

- hey, your post
(Yeah? What about our post?)

- Cool post! How much stuff did you have to look up in order to write this one? I can tell you put some work in.
(Huh? Our web design terms and conditions? Um, we made up rules, and wrote about them.)

- This blog helped me explain this subject to my son. Thanks
(Well, if your son is about 18 and going into web designing and needs to know how to write a few terms and conditions for his new business, then we’re glad our post could help!)

Hm, we wonder what it is that’s in our terms and conditions that gets a lot of people to it? Oh, well, whatever! It’s back to work for now. We feel a bit better now, letting out a few of our frustrations regarding blog spammers, by writing this post! You see, spammers out there – write longer comments that actually say something, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get something decent back for your efforts – perhaps even a visit to the site you’re trying to promote! And, hey, if you are able to write these longer more meaningful comments we speak of, you will no longer be considered a spammer, but a blogger instead! But by the looks of some of the comments we see all over the Internet (also on some other blogs where the owners actually let a lot of these silly comments through), we don’t think spammers give a hoot about exchanging their role of “spammer” to “blogger.”

Related posts on this blog:
Why do people spam?
and
A warning to people who pay people to comment on blogs

© Terry and Tony