Yesterday I received an anonymous comment from Phentermine-Yi. I’m going to admit my ignorance right off the bat at not knowing what phentermine was, as I’ve never sought pharmaceutical treatment for my weight problem. The text of the comment was “Good site…Nice design.” I thought nothing of it and didn’t even look at the header information until today, when I received something like six more comments to the same post. “Yes…good post.” I get loads of spam to the comments, but I’ve refined the filter so that it usually goes straight into the moderation bin and generally even the crudely disguised ones are obvious because they’ll show up in the comments for posts I made 5 months ago.
I’m assuming this new spam follows a model where the initial offending post is sent from an entry on a list and then verified later. If the post wasn’t deleted or otherwise blocked, the entry is greenlighted for spamming. (UPDATE: certain that this process has an official or semi-official name, I did some research but turned up nothing. The fact that I don’t already know means they’re probably going to take my geek license.)
Comment spam drives me nuts. Email spam is (obviously) like getting junkmail in your mailbox. It’s annoying, but can be immediately dealt with. Spamming blog comments is like someone slapping a bumper sticker on your car while you’re in the grocery store buying milk. In this case, I drove around with the bumper sticker for 24-hours before I noticed it.