Spam comments tend to come in spurts; lately, the stream has been pretty intense. There have already been 220 spam comments caught by Akismet (an indispensable WordPress plugin) this month.
I’m not totally sure of the purpose of a lot of it, but most follows a pretty simple pattern: flattery. Here are some quotes:
“This is probably the most extraordinary blogs Ive examine inside a extremely extended time. The quantity of info in here is stunning, like you practically wrote the book on the topic. Your blog is excellent for everyone who would like to fully grasp this topic much more. Excellent things; please keep it up!”
“I very much like your site. Very good posts! Please keep posting such awesome cotent.”
“I don’t usually reply to posts but I will in this case. WoW”
They appeal to a very basic fact about those of who write blogs: we like to be praised. And we like comments. There are probably some people out there that are willing to put up with the spam, just to have the positive comments.
Me, I just read the spam comments and pretend they are real. :-)
As of this morning, there have been 551 attempts to post spam on this blog just since February. To be honest, the Akismet plugin is one of the great arguments for using WordPress; it does an excellent job of screening out the junk. In that same time frame, it’s only stopped one message that should have gone through. I run 4 blogs at work. Three of them use WordPress; the other uses something else (I have no idea what). I have to go onto that blog several times a week and remove the spam comments.