Back in May I mused idly about hair in a very brief blog post.  For months now I’ve been plagued with a torrent of comment spam on that particular post, and I’m now disabling comments on it altogether.

This is the most unsubtle form of spam, full of utterly blatant keywords and phrases like “nude teens”, “pre-teen sex”, “lolitas”, “hairy pussy”, “nymphet incest” linking to the spammer’s sites.  So surely it should be trivial for a spam filter like akismet to deal with them?

Akismet can tend to be over-zealous with legitimate comments, and regularly tends to caution when posts contain links.  For example, Andrew’s recent comment on my Mac troubles includes helpful links which caused Akismet to send it to me for moderation.  Most regular spam just gets automatically binned without my ever knowing about it unless I actively take the trouble to check.  So how the heck does this particular crap get past it?  If Akismet were human, I’d have to suppose (s)he was either being blackmailed or taking backhanders!

It’s not even as if links from here have obvious spam value: wordpress automatically inserts rel=nofollow to tell the ‘bots to ignore them.  And my blog is actively managed: I welcome comments but remove spam, including the traditional innocent-looking stuff that just says something bland like “nice blog”, or even spam compliments like a “thank you for saying that” where they wrap a link.  My criterion is not what someone links to, but whether the ‘comment’ contributes to discussion or is a ‘bot that’s just posting at random or at best has latched onto some key word or phrase in a post.

Talking of which, I wonder why that particular post attracted so much crap?  Is it perhaps the phrase “Long luxuriant hair” appearing in a legitimate comment?  Or maybe the title of the blog entry means something different in the spambot’s world?

Let’s see if this entry attracts similar crap.  If it does, I might (reluctantly) have to close comments here too.