bluerghh comment spam. Seem to be getting a fair bit of spam recently never sure if its some clever bot or a human.
Some comments are obvious spam, people whose mother called them ‘lean mean griller’ was obviously destined to have a website selling grillers. This is spam simples. Although its a bit dumb why would my site have any authority on that at all someones just wasting there own time as well as mine.

Often though the content seems generated by a machine they pick key words out of post. I was reading about markov chains sounds like that would be the way to go if you were trying to generate human sounding content. Perhaps if I read a bit more I can reverse engineer them as a sort of spam detector.

Often though I wonder if the commenter is actually a human its just that they are writing in their second language. So they phrase things a bit oddly which is fine/dandy I’m sure I would if I was trying to comment on someones blog in something other than my first language.

So I try to be positive towards them. I know some people just delete all comments but I’m happy to talk to anyone just not bots or people whose parents named them after seo terms, products or dating sites ⁽¹⁾.

Anyway I’ve written a really simple WordPress plugin to represent the percentage of comments that are Pending, Approved, Spam or Trash. It’s output will update as more comments come in. I cleared a load of trashed ones out so the results seem a bit off at the moment.

Incidentally it will be quite fun to see how much spam I get on this post :D, how smart are the bots?

ps: if you want a name for your child here are some neat ones for boys: ichabod, octavius, titus, elastic, borin for girls: cornelia, precious.