Ah, lunchtime. The time of day when a persons thoughts turn to… tasty canned meat products. Oh, perhaps, they turn to the other kind of…
I mention this because I happened to look at my WordPress Dashboard, and saw the little note: “Akismet has protected your site from 23,482 spam comments already.”. Over 23,000 spam messages since I moved to WordPress in January. Wow.
Seeing all this, I thought I would write a little post for the spammers with some advice on how to get comments on this blog accepted:
- First and foremost: Make the content of your comment relate to the post. If it has absolutely no connection with the post, it stays as spam. For example, if in response to a post on politics, you write “Hey cheers! I apply earbuds abroad because health of their portability, even though I favor over all the ear”…. it ain’t gonna fly.
- Don’t just complement my blog. I know my blog is great; I don’t need comments saying it. I want an intelligent dialogue with my readers, not sycophants. Thus, a comment like “Very interesting info!Perfect just what I was looking for!” won’t fly on its lonesome (especially if the link for the poster is a site selling designer handbags… more on that later).
- Don’t tell me you’ve bookmarked my site (“Hi there, I found your web site via Google while searching for a related topic, your site came up, it looks great. I’ve bookmarked it in my google bookmarks.”). I don’t care. Comment on the specific post.
- Make your post grammatically correct (e.g., not “You are my aspiration , I have few web logs and occasionally run out from to post .”). If you don’t know how to compose proper English sentences, you will not be posted.
- For that matter, make your posts in English. If I can’t read your post, I won’t approve it. Russian spam (“фото звезд”)… I’m looking at you.
- Comment on a recent post. I’m still getting spam comments on posts I made last January; just a few minutes ago, I received a comment (“Hi my family member! I wish to say that this post is awesome, nice written and come with almost all vital infos.”) on a post about the iPod I made back in June. If you are commenting on something more than a week or two old, especially when it is not on topic, you’re a canned meat product.
- I look at the sites you claim to be from. If your comment has as its authors link a site clearly selling something, be it designer-knockoff purses, sex, viagra, or anything else, potted meat you are. Yes, this includes the purveyors of “ugg boots uk cheap”.
- I also look at your email address. What, you won’t give me an email address? Sorry, Charlie.
- If you are attempting linkbacks, the article from which you are linking had better relate to the linked article. For example, on a post regarding the musical “Justin Love”, I just received a linkback from a site with the webaddress “xamthonedistributor(dot)net/harga-xamthone/4570035123”. Somehow, I can’t believe this site has anything to do with a musical about a gay celebrity coming out of the closet.
I think, in all the time I’ve been using Askemet, I’ve had two false positives. I’ve gotten pretty trusting of its results. Of course, it will be interesting to see what spam gets attached to this post.
Of course, what I really want is non-spam comments. That’s where you come in. I encourage you to comment and interact with me on the subjects of my posts, and turn this into a conversation.
