While I’ve somehow completely eradicated comment spam for the time being here, I’m getting a decent amount on an old page elsewhere on the server that allowed comments. It fell into disuse long ago, so I’ve done some behind-the-scene tweaks to make it more of a honeypot for spammers. They don’t seem to care that no one visits the page anymore. I did a purge of a lot of the spam, before, halfway-through, deciding to keep it as a honeypot. Some of them are replying to threads that don’t even exist anymore. I’d never coded in anything to check whether the parent thread existed, so it’s “accepting” their comments, but they’re not even showing up on the page. And still they come!

Recent words of inspiration from one spammer, right before a set of links to porn:

Your site has very much liked me. I shall necessarily tell about him to the friends.

I beg to differ. My site does not very much like you. While it may smile while accepting your comments, it’s not smiling because it likes you. It’s smiling because it’s assembling a list of spamming IPs, and you’ve just landed on it. Please do, however, tell your friends to spam the page, too.

P.S. – I have deliberately refrained from linking to the page being abused, as I want to minimize its popularity, both to avoid giving the spammers exposure and to minimize the risk of someone leaving actual comments.