Spam Bots: Flattery Will Almost Get You Everywhere

Credit: hegarty_david (Flickr)

Throughout the nearly four years of this blog’s existence, the Akismet plugin has consistently kept C&B free of comment spam. As I understand it, what Akismet does with my blog comments is pretty much the same thing that spam filters do with your email inbox. There is one difference, though, at least in my experience.

I use Gmail, and I’d estimate that maybe four or five spam emails per month manage to sneak past Gmail’s filters and get to my inbox. No big deal. Once or twice a month I scroll quickly through my Gmail spam folder to check for false positives, and there normally are one or two. Pretty good spam blocking overall, wouldn’t you say? Me too.

Well, get this: in the history of this blog, I cannot recall even once finding a false positive in my Akismet comment spam queue. On perhaps five or six occasions, spam comments have eluded Akismet and temporarily appeared on C&B. I keep a pretty close eye on comment activity here, since cultivating comment activity is an important goal for any blog. I can use all the legitimate comments I can get, so I check the comment spam queue regularly, hoping to find a false positive. But there never is. Stupid Akismet. Stupid… unfailingly accurate, reliable Akismet.

The most nearly admirable thing that can be said about spammers is that they consistently become cleverer and more sophisticated. This morning a comment in the Akismet spam queue almost fooled me for a moment, using a certain ploy more authentically than I’d seen before from a spam bot. Seeing as how I live in Hollywood, you’d think my Empty Flattery Detector would be more highly-attuned than average.

Check out the ego-stroking comment highlighted in the image at left. “Well, mister commenter,” I thought, “I really hope you mean that. Your URL does look a little spammy… but maybe you really are an actual person, sitting in front of your screen at your crappy web store call center job, and you really do think I’m a professional-caliber writer.” As the green markings show, I googled the email address to find out.

The result:

“Pfft! I knew it. You rat bastard, you say that to all the blogs.”