I don’t know what is going on, but a whole bunch of spam slipped through the comment filter on Sunday (and perhaps today, if this is a trend). The ones that made me maddest were the ones that pretended to be my friends, or worse yet – me. Those spam bots are getting smarter and smarter – almost ‘human’, I tell you. Here’s a few examples:
Fake Beth (replying to Lloyd):
Fake Deborah (replying to me):
Fake Me (replying to Kitt):
I’m terribly sorry, everyone. Oh, well. Better spam than spunicorn.
Brad says
Maybe April 18 is a special day to spammers. I had 41 new messages in my spam filter. I usually have two or three. For some reason, almost every single one of the spam messages yesterday was targeted to THIS post.
Four of the messages that got filtered were just Peggy trying to comment on yesterday’s post. The filter must’ve been in “high alert” mode or something. Sorry Peggy.
Lauren says
(I never trusted Peggy.) 😉
Lloyd says
I changed the program that tries to filter spam from “Akismet” to “Mollom”. So that means that we won’t get any more spam, so we’ll never know if the new one is better than the old one. Not that Akismet is bad. It’s normally quite good.
This new one will do something different if it can’t tell if your comment is spam. It will ask you fill out one of those little “Captcha” forms to prove that you are, indeed, human.
Non-humans be warned.
Lloyd says
Also, Lauren learned how to do screen shots yesterday.
Deborah says
Is that like Jello shots?
Peggy says
HA! You funny Deborah!
I don’t understand all this talk…so what you’re saying is that those fake comments aren’t from people, but the computer does it? I don’t get it.
Yay for Akismet and Mollum…even though it sounds like you guys are members of the Taliban.
Lloyd says
There are two reasons that “people” do spam comments on websites:
1. To get people to click on the links to either buy their (usually shady) products or to be infected with viruses and other malware.
2. To get more links to their website so that they appear higher in search engines like google for their product.
It would be tedious for them to post all of those comments personally, so they write computer programs to do it for them.
There are other people writing programs to try to keep those spam comments from getting through. The one that we were using seems to have had a bad day yesterday, so we’re trying a different one.
Peggy says
Wow…thanks!
You’re ‘The Anomaly’ aren’t you? Or would you prefer to be called ‘The One’?
Kristi says
So how do we know that Lloyd and Lauren are really real? Perhaps their spam-bots, and we’ve been fooled all these years. Who are they??
Lloyd says
Some people say that we’re all spambots.
Curt says
Holy Crap. I didn’t even know that existed. This is proof that there is too much thinking going on out in the world.
BACON!!!
Lloyd says
Has anyone been asked to fill out the captcha form yet?
Peggy says
Yes, I have for both of my comments. What does that mean? Am I a machine who longs to be human?
Kristi says
Oh, Peggy, we thought we knew you. Now I don’t know.