Comments on: “Human” Comment Spammer

By: Tony Tsai

Tony Tsai — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:54:21 +0000

I think if someone tries to spam with “manual” labor…. he has way too much time in hand…LOL

By: Nowak

Nowak — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:25:01 +0000

Time consuming, yes. But think of much smaller wages in, for example, China.

By: Rosie Manning

Rosie Manning — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:17:34 +0000

Well, it’s not fair to block ChinaNet. Not everyone is a spammer but it does create a bad image to ChinaNet nonetheless.

Not many people would actually waste their time to comment spam manually because it’s simply too time consuming.

For me, I would just block the IP Address using .htaccess. Anyways, I don’t really get much traffic from China…mostly from US 🙂

By: Nowak

Nowak — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:07:11 +0000

This kind of spam will definetelly grow since spammers realize that a few comments on highly valued blogs is better than hundreds of comments on blogs that are seldom visited.

From my experience however, blogs allowing instant commenting get more and better comments, hence better and more viral content in the long run. After all, if you spend time writing a comment you don’t want it to be trown away.

CAPTCHA does fairly good job of stopping hte most obvious. But one should think twice before taking more drastic measures.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 05:27:38 +0000

I get some of “human” spammers as well on my blogs. I guess it’s just part of the game. What to do about it? Add it to my daily chore…

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 01:39:37 +0000

I was getting the same garbage. Even with a captcha plugin and a gatekeeper question to only get “humans”, I kept getting tons of it. Finally, I just started watching the IP’s of the spammers, and outright banned their entire subdomains via my webhost. I doubt I lost too many readers, as I feel confident I’m not widely regarded in China. =P

By: Michael Clark

Michael Clark — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:11:57 +0000

Hi Ron, Your message was right on the edge of spam due to two things:

1. The email address you left was for a mortgage refinance company.

2. The URL you left a link to was to a Squidoo lens that was highly questionable.

Defining spam comments is like pornography. I can’t necessarily define it, but I know it when I see it. And links to “bad” sites, source IP addresses that resolve to “bad” countries, and email addresses that are “bad” all help add up to a “bad” comment.

By: Ron

Ron — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 10:09:58 +0000

Thing is, when does manual commenting become spam? Is my comment here spam? What constitutes a comment being unworthy?

Is it the actual content? I suppose if your chinese visitor posted just lists of links, that would be spam, regardless if it was posted manually. If he posted questions or comments, and just had a link in his name (like this post) – is he spamming or commenting?