I checked my blog comments this morning, and got quite excited. Normally I get a comment or two per week, but today there were 11 new comments. And they were for a variety of different posts, ones from recently and some from quite a while ago.
I clicked on the Comment arrow in the Dashboard, and was intrigued to see they were all meaningless jumled letters. 11 comments, all spam, all with 2 links in them, all not pointing at anything in particular.
I mass-deleted them, but probably should have inspected them a little more closely first, just to see what the story with them was. I did notice they all came from different IP addresses, all used reasonable first names as the Commenter Name, and all had the same set of character in them: erdfcv.
A quick Google on this provided not many clues. There is a user on immigration.com forums, and an eBay user, and a whole lot of foreign (non-English) language pages. Chinese, Arabic, Polish, Hungarian, and Korean, to name a few.
Then I looked at the keyboard.
qwERt asDFg zxCVb
I’m such a tool, this is not a random set of strings, but a common(ish) method of coming up with a set of letters. Like QWERTY but less recognisable.
I had some more comment spam tonight: at least this one kind of made sense - it was pointing towards some site with the word ‘carreview’ in the domain name.
That’s been added to my grey wordlist…
11 hours, 26 minutes after the fact.
I got the same thing yesterday. I changed the the setting to require approval for comments, but that’s not really satisfactory. I’d deactivated the spaminator plugin due to false positives, so now I’m not exactly sure what to do.
1 day after the fact.