Comments on: Blog comment spam with plagiarized text: hard to spot

By: Daniel Tetreault

Daniel Tetreault — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:35:43 +0000

Hi there. I recently was reading a blog post on spamming. The writer mentioned your blog post and that’s how I came across this post. I too am a webmaster however I must disagree with this comment made by Gravity:

” … Gravity Says: August 5th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

i am using a challenge plugin for my wordpress to avoid spam comments, Askimet is not enough to blog all the spam
…”

I have been emailed by WordPress to moderate just three spam issues. About 98% of all my spam is caught automatically with Askimet. I love the Akimet WP Plug-in!
Daniel,
Sidney, BC

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:54:35 +0000

I had the same situation too, Sorry for my bad english but i am german. all i can understand was interesting, nice post cu

By: David

David — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 22:47:03 +0000

This is an interesting situation. We don’t know if the post was done by a person or a computer.
Alan Turing said that real artificial intelligence exists only if the output from a computer is indistinguishable from a human response.
Are we there yet?

By: Pande

Pande — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:16:41 +0000

I think there’s a physical spammer behind that kind of comments. Bots aren’t that sophisticated…

By: diTesco

diTesco — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:23:51 +0000

Definitely an interesting debate as to human or not, the act of these apparent spammers. I have seen blogs with so many comments that it is hard (except for th obvious – great post – nice post – where did you get this template, etc) to sometimes identify the good from the bad. Hard work, but comments can always be moderated, or trashed even if has been published. Only filter I know that actually works.

By: Brad Blogging.com

Brad Blogging.com — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:25:06 +0000

I keep seeing comment spam that looks more and more like real comments. Soon the technology the spammers use will be so good, it will get by the best filters.

By: Jay

Jay — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:24:59 +0000

At first I thought it looked kind of natural to me then the repetitive nature of *RDF* and *Technology* seem to me that they may have been the anchor keywords this bot was trying to gain popularity in. The scary thought is these bots can be out sourced on places like rent a coder and built for about $100, probably by a person who’s first language is not even English, and here we are debating if its real or automated. Kinda funny.

By: Big Ben Patton

Big Ben Patton — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:00:25 +0000

It seems that in the fight against spam, short pointless comments for backlinks and now on topic plagiarized comments we will all have to find ways that are unobtrusive to normal real readers, and at the same time devise a way that is better than captcha but still involves the need for a human element.

If not then I guess I am doomed to answering what 4+4 is or if something is hot or cold, and what was that last one? Am I human? Are you serious?

I think we need to hold a conference on this and put pens to paper and see what we can come up with. Captcha is busted and we need something better.

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:55:09 +0000

I still havent seen an answer to the question raised earlier of it is relevant and is not inflammatory, do you not run the risk of deleting valid commentary? As to human or bot, there should be a new category of hubot which would include those folk of third world status who, while not bots are also not fully participatory in the forums (i.e; not human). As to duplicate checkers, all it takes is rewriting in a small way to beat them.

By: Gravity

Gravity — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:24:19 +0000

i am using a challenge plugin for my wordpress to avoid spam comments, Askimet is not enough to blog all the spam