Bloggers love to receive comments on their posts. It means somebody, somewhere, is reading their words. Their work, in other words, was worth it.
Or at least that’s what i thought.
“Somebody is reading my post. Somebody is interested in what i have to say. Those hours, when i could have been relaxing on the couch instead of fighting blogger’s block or tapping out several hundred words, were well spent.”
Turns out that not all of those ‘commentators’ are legit. Some are spammers scanning the net for places to secrete their evil seed.
When my iPhone beeped through an email message and i saw it was a comment to a blog post (yes, i’m anal enough to have them linked to my email account) i was intrigued. But before i clicked on the email message, i had received two more comments. Three messages in such quick succession? I’m no Not Quite Nigella, so i suspected something was up.
The first comment, in response to a post about hormone free beef, read:
“These kind of appetizer recipes give you a fresh take on what you should provide the next getaway potluck. rEgarding thanksgiving, christmas, or brand-new seasons eve, house prepares food can incredible their particular friends using…”
What the? Would anybody in their right mind click on a link to a website that promised some outlandish amount of free recipes when the those orchestrating the virtual hook-up have such bad English and grammar?
The sentence – if you can call the badly constructed selection of words – didn’t even end. It just tailed off into the website link.
The second random comment, in response to a cookbook review of Neil Jensen’s cookbook Urban Cook: Cooking and Eating for a Sustainable Future, read:
“People who have Weber bbq bbq grills recognize this specific — that every period all of us buy virtually any style of Weber propane gas grills, there is a totally free recipe book which matches the idea. But in addition to the …”
Again, the tail-off to the same web link.
So i’ve logged the messages as spam. And i’m looking for a better workaround. Comments anyone? But only if they’re legit.
thefoodsage.wordpress.com 
LOL! I don’t know how these spammers have the time or energy to formulate such nonsensical messages, and for what? A just as absurd website that nobody is interested in? I have installed Akismet to filter a lot of the spam messages. It has a 100% success rate in identifying the spam, but sometimes legitimate messages also get caught. So it’s always a nice surprise when I go through the spam messages to see one that was meant to be published.
I don’t quite understand these spammers and they seriously irritate me, but I think installing a filter is definitely the way to go 🙂
LikeLike
Great feedback. I will definitely look into installing a filter. I will do my homework this weekend. Thanks for your advice.
LikeLike
Rachel, like Thanh, I use Akismet & find it vey efficient. It does seem to stop just about everything, but it also pays to check before you clean out the spam filter as I also occasionally find the genuine comment in there.
Spammers a complete mystery to me. I understand that they are bots, but someone must spend the time writing all that crap and I just don’t understand how it can possibly be worth the effort.
On the other hand, it can be amusing to see just how many really odd things end up in the spam filter. I usually get a wide range which includes viagra offers, designer handbags, Polish snow removers (?!) and printer cartridges!
LikeLike
Thanks Amanda. I will check out Akismet. And i agree. Who on earth would want to spend time writing all those stupid – nonsensical – comments?
LikeLike
Rachel I enjoy reading the comments on my blog (and thanks so much to you for your kind words) and I always leave a comment in response. Funnily enough, my events page, and more particularly the Noosa Food and Wine Festival snippet, has now received a number of positive comments from Qld hotels. At first I was pleased, but as more arrive and they all read the same, I am starting to suspect spam. I made a comment yesterday. Why spammers bother is beyond me. Great post, thanks for raising the issue!
LikeLike
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Lizzie. I admit, i read the spammer comments and just shake my head. They often just don’t make any sense! Why do they bother? I guess it’s all about generating traffic. I hate to think they’re successful, though. But i suspect they are.
LikeLike
Hehe thanks for the shoutout Rachel! 🙂 With those spam messages, it sounds like they use content generation software to create a comment that sounds vaguely related to the topic that the post is about. But it never quite makes sense does it? I also use Akismet to sort through spam and it seems to work. Sometimes it will let spam messages through so I ensure that I approve all of the comments and sometimes it puts legit commenters in spam (there are two bloggers that regularly leave comments and I just go into the spam queue every day to fish their comments out) 🙂
LikeLike