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

I had a double take when viewing my Akismet spam haul this afternoon, namely due to an extremely realistic and well crafted spam comment.

At first blush, it looks entirely convincing, apart from excess trailing periods ‘…’, the comment spam replicates valid wp ping and trackback formatting reasonably well. Be honest, had you spotted this in a moderation queue with a bunch of other valid comments, would it not be easy to accept without realising it is indeed spam?

So, whilst the spammer has crafted spam into something that doesn’t actually look quite like spam¹, Akismet wasn’t so convinced. Thus, into the spam queue it went.. which is why, despite the risks of false positives that heuristics or Bayesian based scanners can suffer, they aren’t all bad.

On a blog with a highly active comment count, I could easily imagine this kind of comment could be incorrectly identified as a valid comment and approved, indeed without spam filtering, it would likely been published post haste.

Has anyone else come across these seemingly innocuous yet very definitely hinting at being ‘crafted’ spam comments in their travels?

Edit: And it would seem WP 2.1 has now roasted the footnotes plugin I was using - how fucking convenient.

1. .. although, on further reflection, the comment author isn’t the usual mess of blog and article name one comes to expect (↩)