A New Form of Comment Spam

This blog has been receiving a lot of comment spam recently. The comment is always the same i.e. “You have an interesting site.” The name and e-mail address change though. At first I couldn't figure out why someone would bother with such spam.

From my experience, most comment spam includes a link. This makes sense as spammers are trying to get traffic to their sites where they will undoubtedly try to sell the visitor something. But the most recent comment spam didn't include a link, so it initially didn't seem to serve any purpose.

Then something occurred to me. Some blogging systems such as WordPress flag certain comments with links to require moderation before they become public. And they also sometimes require a user to have a previously approved comment before future comments are automatically approved. This latest comment spam that I've mention could be an attempt to circumnavigate these rules. By submitted a complimentary comment e.g. “nice site” without a link which I will presumably approve, the spammer is setting themselves up to have the ability to submit future comments with links that will automatically be approved. Pretty sneaky, huh?

At this point the second phase of comment spam has yet to appear on my site, so the above is pure speculation.