Christian Little

Today I’m celebrating my 1000th comment spam! I guess that’s a good thing, as this site must be doing well enough to be getting hit with about 50-75 comment spams per day now (it would be nice if I got that many legit comments!).

To all of my actual readers I’d like to thank you for coming back again and again. While this site isn’t anywhere near the level of several webmaster blogs, looking back on the past two months I feel that I’ve contributed a lot to the webmaster community and hope to continue offering tips and tricks to other web monkeys.

In light of this achievement, I spent some time today looking through some of the comments that have been flagged by Akismet as spam and found one interesting one:

That comment really threw me off. I’m looking at it, and notice that it appeared in a huge stack of comments that were submitted within about 30 minutes of each other. I went digging further and found 5 other comments that were virtually identical to this.

So are some comment spammers actually offering an opt-out of their hit lists?

Let’s take a few things into consideration:

1. Most comment spam software uses dynamic IP’s (aka Proxy Servers), multiple email addresses, random names, and other methods to make every comment they post appear from a completely different computer/person.
2. Most comment spammers live outside of North America, which protects them from the anti-spam laws that we have in the US and Canada
3. Most comment spammers will ignore you if you contact them to stop spamming you.

Now here’s a thought I had about this opt-out link - if I enter my URL into their form to get off their list, chances are the spam will just go up as they know the site is actively monitored. In fact, I’m betting that my spam volume will shoot through the roof because I filled out the form.

So as an experiment I filled out the form from one of the spammers and will be monitoring my spam activity. But I would be willing to be that by doing it they’ve identified a site that actually checks their spam and will flood it even more.

Have any of you experimented with this?

Related Blogs

I tried to find other blogs talking about this, but suffice to say the pickings are slim. Nobody seems to be addressing this.

• All Spammers are Morons - you gotta admire the response he sent to the spammer
• Another blog that got hit by it