HoundsGood: Chronicles of a Virtual Volunteer

Every so once in awhile, some sort of new spam software seems to come out. I am not on any sort of notification list. Rather, I notice patterns in spam comments.  A year or two ago, it was about a little incomprehensible text followed by a list of links for enhancement pills or casino sites.  About six months ago, there was a bigger influx of comments in broken English, such as.

Good share. I search internet whole day for it. This day is Wednesday.

Then, it was the march of the really, really generic comments.

This is the best article ever. I was saying to may friend the other day that this is the best website ever on such an important subject like the one you write about.

In the past week or two, many comments have actually related somewhat to the article in a very general way.

I really like cats! They are my favorite.

While a legitimate reader may make a general declarative statement, watch the “name” and the homepage of the poster. Some editors and bloggers do not accept comments from folks with keywords for names.  I don’t always abide by this because there are many people that use “handles” or the name of their blog or website as their name.  I do watch when their name is long or quite sploggy, such as ‘buy pharmaceuticals direct on the internet” or their homepage url is long and suspicious.  One other observation is that spam comments often include an asterisk “*” or a dash at the end.  Of course, real people can do this too, but more often than not it denotes spam.  In the past week or so, the symbols has been disappearing. Maybe whatever software spammers use is getting “wise.”

Either way, be careful out there.

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