smackfoo.com | I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Remember the good old days of comment spam when each comment was either entered by hand using the old copy-and-paste routine or by a snippet of code that injected content into a valid comment form?

We all know that comment spam has evolved since then and various mass injection scripts or bots have been known to do the rounds with varying degrees of success, however, it’s become apparent that anti-spam plugins and technology like Akismet have become a little too effective.

Too affective? Right now you’re thinking I’ve lost the plot surely, right?

There is a new breed of retro-spam doing the rounds, that involves hordes of people going back to basics and using simple scripts (or manual labour) to inject ‘innocent’ looking comments into the comment queue. These frequently have only one, or indeed no links whatsoever in the comment body, with the comment author website being the random spam site.

It’s a very crafty approach, as blocking on ‘x number of links’, known spam sites, or even keyword sniffing leads to a very hit-and-miss result as cranking up the heat via the usual spam ‘dictionary’ will reduce the distinction between both spam and valid comments alike. Indeed as the technology evolves to combat spam, it’s interesting to note we’ve got to a point where the technology is smart enough to nuke a spam-bot or query hack, but too advanced to deal with old-skool comment injection using valid auto-fill form methods.

Hell, Firefox and IE7 make this a walk in the park - submit, save form details, refresh, post, refresh, post.. rinse, repeat ad nauseam..

So how does one fight this kind of old-tech onslaught? The same method that has always been 100% successful - regular manual purging of comment spam. It’s a nuisance, time consuming and as frustrating as all fuck, but it works. Set a no-fly-zone for spammers and eventually they will give up, at least until the next spamming technology hits the streets.