Posts Tagged ‘spam’

Akismet Free Ride Ends

Tuesday, January 8th, 2019

For almost as long as I was using this blog, I’ve been using the free Akismet spam filter. Well, the free ride has finally ended, as they actually want $5 a month to use it now. I’m not complaining, as a man’s got to eat. But this is why I had several hundred WordPress moderate comment emails today.

Since my blog is currently a slightly-money-losing proposition, I have no desire to deepen my losses, so I just moved to the free Antispam Bee for this blog and Futuramen. Dwight is evidently paying the $5 a month for Akismet for his blog, so we can compare after a month or so and see if there’s a noticeable difference between the two.

Anyway, on the off-chance you submitted a blog comment after, say, 11:58 AM today, you might have to repost it.

And maybe somebody can explain why most of my comment spam seemed to come from an Omaha injury lawyer…

The Bots Are Getting Smarter. (And Leon is Getting LARGER!)

Sunday, November 21st, 2010

(Sigh) I may have mentioned that I have to clear out a fair amount of comments spam that Akismet catches every day.

Well, whoever programs bot seemed to have figured out at least that this is a political blog, as I’ve been getting a lot of generic anti-Charlie Rangel comments on threads that have nothing to do with Charlie Rangel. Close, but no cigar bot guys. (Or, to put it in your own bot language, “Your cigar with excellent closeness you fail to reach.”)

But I can see a day when bot spam may start to mimic at least a semi-competent troll. As usual, there’s an XKCD for that:

How Not to Post Content Spam

Sunday, October 24th, 2010

Like a lot of blogs, BattleSwarm gets a lot of automatically-generated, badly-written content spam, most of which is supposed to flatter you ego without actually addressing anything in the blog post, and many times the posted name attached to the spam is particularly absurd . (Hint: I’m pretty sure no one in the world was born with the name “Forex Robot.”)

But this one trapped in today’s spam filter was particularly incompetent:

“I’ve been browsing around #hostname and actually am astounded by the terrific content material here.”

Well, we here at #hostname attract only the most discerning #spmabots thanks to our truly selective posting of only the finest information on #topicofblogpost…