So today I login to my WordPress Dashboard, and look what I see!

It’s exciting comment spam. WordPress mentions comment spam as:

If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time you’re probably familiar with “spam” in your email inbox. For the uninitiated, spam is an unsolicited commercial message, or something you didn’t ask for trying to sell you something. So what does this have to do with blogs? Well just like you can get spam messages in your inbox, people will leave spam comments on your blog. However unlike email spam where the target is you, comment spam generally targets search engines.

Luckily for me, and pretty much everyone who uses WordPress, we can use Askimet.com, a free program made by the same people who made WordPress (Automattic) that can target comment spam and prevent it from actually appearing on your blog. Instead, it gets held in a queue where you can happily delete it.

Askimet has actually produced some seemingly alarming statistics on their Live Spam Zeitgeist which states:

10,843,420,953 spams caught so far [since November 2005]
14,897,321 so far today
83% of all comments are spam

Even more scary — in the time it took me to copy and paste that number, and then write this sentence, the amount of total spam caught went up by 18,419.

So how hard is it to catch comment spam?

Well considering it looks like garbled junk that monkeys typed out on their way to creating Shakespeare… it doesn’t seem very hard to catch comment spam at all.

As you can see, it doesn’t look like the people who make comment spam are trying too hard to bypass people’s spam filters. Nor do they look like they’re trying hard to make them even look like legitimate comments that victims visitors would interact with or that webmasters wouldn’t delete on sight.

At least they go to the trouble to type actual words. Sometimes the spam comments look like this:

And not only are they not trying at all to make legitimate comments, the pages they are spamming links to don’t look that exciting either.

Although, I must admit that a very small amount of spam does make a little bit more effort than the “Let’s hit them with 60 messages and hope one gets through” deal. Look at this innocent comment:

All in all, the attempt on behalf of comment spammers seems very nonexistent. Maybe they should go back to trying to mail enlargement pills to my inbox. Or give up altogether.

PS: 175,397 more spam comments were flagged by Askimet since I last mentioned the number previously in this article.

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