If you run a blog, one of the maintenance chores is dealing with comment spam. They’re usually easy to recongise; either banal “This is a really informative post” or surreal bot-generated gibberish. This was a typical one from a few months back:
“What i do not realize is in reality how you’re no longer really much more well-preferred than you may be now. You are very intelligent. You understand therefore considerably when it comes to this topic, produced me personally consider it from numerous various angles. Its like women and men aren’t interested unless it��s something to accomplish with Lady gaga! Your personal stuffs great. Always take care of it up!”
This one, though, looked superficially convincing.
When I initially commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get several e-mails with the same comment.
Is there any way you can remove me from that service?
Now I do have the subscribe-to-comments plugin installed, and it’s not inconceiveable that something might have gone wrong with it. But it smelled a bit fishy, not least because I didn’t recognise the name.
First clue (which ought to have been obvious from the fact that the comment was held in the moderation queue in the first place) was that nobody using that email address had ever left a comment on this site. The second clue was that it was left against a several months old post that had no comments.
Once I looked at the subscribe-to-comments database, there was no sign of that address. So I concluded it was spam, and shot it.
Hats off, by the way, to Askimet, which traps hundreds of spam comments a week, leaving just two or three in an average week that need to be moderated manually. No way could I have open comments on this blog without it; it’s an absolutely critical part of the WordPress ecosystem.
