Comment Spam

[Trevorjc]

A couple of months ago i registered a domain name, added to my hosting account and activated wordpress on the site, pretty normal so far. Due to work commitments i have not been able to do much on the site yet and have just added a couple of pages and edited the original "hello world" post to say site under construction blah blah.

Not surprisingly the site gets no traffic which is not an issue yet, but i kid you not in the last week there has been approx 40 comments added to the hello world post and similar amount on both the pages. The comments are mostly from sports betting or online casino type sites or obvious spam names, what i can't understand is why? Ok theres the link of course but my site is not being worked on yet and all i will do is delete them anyway. Is there any other reason for it? And why do they not show as visitors on google analytics?

[benitez17]

They're probably bots that found the site somehow. They wouldn't show up in Google Analytics because they aren't able to run javascript.

If you enable captchas or some other verification method, it will probably cut down on the amount of spam you have to delete.

[DomainMagnate]

Spam bots are quick to find new sites! Set up akismet, it'll take care of it.

[BritishARMY]

There's alot of software out there that scrapes blogs from search engines and then posts to them. You're most likely a victim of people doing this. As suggested above, aksimet should sort out most of the spam. You could also turn the comments off for now and then enable them again when you want.

[MrP]

what i can't understand is why?

I'm with you there!

I put up a site (running on wordpress) earlier this year. It does have a small amount of content but I haven't touched it for last few months - kinda left it to age a bit... well, that and other projects keeping me busy. GA says it's getting 3 - 5 visits a day (whoopee! ).

I've set up captchas on the form so I figure the comments are not from Bots. Out of maybe 8 - 12 comments per week, the odd 2 or 3 have links in them. The rest are.... well, here's one of the most recent:

I liked up to you'll obtain carried out proper here. The cartoon is tasteful, your authored subject matter stylish. nonetheless, you command get bought an edginess over that you would like be turning in the following. in poor health surely come more beforehand once more since precisely the similar nearly a lot continuously inside case you protect this increase.

I'm sure they might more sense if I read them after a good night out at the pub . Either that or something went wrong in translation.

EDIT: Just to add - probably 90% of the comment come with a 'gmail' address.

[tke71709]

The fact that you haven't done any work on the site yet makes it appear to be an easy target to spammers.

How many wordpress installations are done that the owner never comes back to ever again? A lot and hence why they feel that their spam is less likely to be deleted.

Besides, as others have mentioned, these things are done by bots, not by real people. It's a numbers game.

[tke71709]

I've set up captchas on the form so I figure the comments are not from Bots.

Lots of bots can break captchas automatically.

I'm sure they might more sense if I read them after a good night out at the pub . Either that or something went wrong in translation.

They want to see what blogs auto approve posts, after they determine that they hit those blogs hard.

[BritishARMY]

It's also worth mentioning that they mainly do this for back links as you will probably know. They put these links in the URL area, so if the comment is accepted their anchor text is a link to their site. If there is no URL then that's odd. The jumbled mush of text is usually a generic spun comment, so sometimes it doesn't make sense, or it'll be totally off topic.

[MrP]

Lots of bots can break captchas automatically.

Is that true for all versions of captchas or just the ones with more basic images..?

[KenW3]

Is that true for all versions of captchas or just the ones with more basic images..?

It depends on the sophistication of the bots. Any captcha can be solved. The more complex images can be forwarded to services like decaptcher.com or deathbycaptcha using an API inserted into the code, which sends the captcha to be solved by a human operator. This is done in poor countries for extremely low rates - DBC is $1.39 per 1,000 solved.