The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

I’ve noticed this happening more and more lately, but it just started this year.  Someone wrote a program that goes around and comments automatically on Wordpress blogs and lets you customize the type of comments left.  This is one i’ve been seeing a lot and a lot of people honestly think it is a real person doing the commenting and not a bot:

“I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.”

Now, looking at that comment you can see how you could stick that on *any* blog post and it would fit pretty well, especially if the blog author doesn’t even know if they are supposed to be listed in Technorati or not.  There are many similar ones but i’ve noticed this one especially because i’ve seen comments from different people that are word for word that exact statement.  If you see someone comment that on one of your posts, sorry it’s a bot and they didn’t actually read your post.

It is starting to get to where i’m cynical and only trust comments that fit a few criteria (some of these by themselves computers can easily fake):

1.  The comment must not have any links in it (other than the link back to the person’s site that uses their name as the anchor text), unless those links are relevant to my post.

2. The comment must be written in somewhat read-able English.

3.  The comment must include some mention of whatever post it is posted to.  Note: this is one that comment spam bots try to get around by snagging a few words from your post to throw into the comment but it is usually pretty obvious.

Anyone else have any good tips on stopping comment spam?  Note that I do use Akismet and it catches most things, but some of these new tactics are starting to get by the system because they sound like legitimate comments.

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