Unlike most people I write my blog postings just for myself. It keeps me happy. So in late 2023 I was surprised to receive a few comments. They looked nice, but at the same time looked odd. Nice, but void of meaning. As if written by a nice friendly bot, but they didn’t actually reference anything to do with the specific content of the blog posting.
Initially I received six of these gratuitous comments (see comment spam), from a variety of email addresses, including one with a photo, and another with a logo.
My initial reaction was to accept these comments, but I then decided to just bin them.
Come Janaury 2024 things start to change
Then in early 2024 I started to receive a few more of these gratuitous comments. My initial reaction was to just bin them as well.
What was clear was that this second round of meaningless comments, were slightly different.
The first round included sentences such as “It’s evident that you’ve put a lot of thought into it”, “This post has been a great resource for me”, and “I look forward to continuing to learn from this website”.
This second wave of comments included “Can you be more specific about the content of your article? After reading it, I still have some doubts.”, and “I don’t think the title of your article matches the content lol”.
The exact expression “After reading it, I still have some doubts” appeared more than once, as did “Hope you can help me”.
Some comments were totally over-the-top, with “This gateway is phenomenal. The magnificent information unveils the creator’s excitement. I’m awestruck and anticipate more such astounding substance”.
Now, in early July 2024, I have received a total of 113 gratuitous comments, almost exclusively deriving from “.com” accounts in one specific cryptocurrency exchange, which stinks of a potential “con”. This specific exchange has a 1-star Trustpilot rating.
Nothing new, happens all the time
As an aside lots of people have noted that the first hundred comments on any YouTube video that has a certain amount of views are “Thank you” messages, praising the content creator like he/she is some kind of god. Typically stuff like “I can’t believe you offer this for free” or “Finally someone who explains this properly”. The comments are just long enough, and banal enough, that they are not discarded by the control algorithms.
The “authors” don’t described what they are thankful for, why the original post is really nice, or what prompted them to leave a comment in the first place. The effusive praise, with lack of any other substantive commentary, is attached to every worthwhile video, and many people don’t even bother to look at comments anymore. Of course, some video producers like to have lots of (positive) comments so they can attract advertising, etc., but it’s a fools game.
From March 2024, comments in Russian
In March there was another “evolution” in the spam I received. I started to receive comments (I presume) in Russian. This was coupled with an increased in spam from the same cryptocurrency exchange.
It was about this time that I started to see the occasional comment from addresses (hotmail or outlook accounts) that were neither the cryptocurrency exchange nor in Russian.
There is always some “give away” characteristics, e.g. no explicit reference to the kind content commented on, and often a “I have a question for you”, designed to incite a reply. Some comments were more designed to incite an approval than a reply. Others were foolish enough to add a stupid extra phrase such as “I opted in for your RSS feed too”, when in fact I don’t have a RSS feed.
I loved the comments about my pages on the history of the Manhattan Project, as being “helpful”.
It was around May 2024 that increasingly the messages would include “commercial-looking” links.
In mid-June 2024 I started to receive just links to different types of medication, e.g. ciprofloxacin (antibiotic), diflucan (antifungal medication), lyrica (to treat epilepsy, etc.), and so on…
And in late June 2024 I started to receive messages from “.ua”, for Ukraine, and about the same time the messages in Russian started to increase.
So why do I get these seemingly nice but total gratuitous and useless comments?
For instance, Calmgrove also appears to receive similar comments. He writes his posts for a ‘readership’, but has also found some comments that were bland and lacked specificity. Others bloggers also appear to have the same problem.
Ron Roizen thinks of gratuitous as being “unwarranted” or “uncalled for” in a negative sense, or “freely given” or “given without the expectation of compensation” in the positive sense. For me the comments I received were neither negative or positive, just irrelevant and a lite form of attention theft.
Some people appear to think that these comments are made by idiots. People who no longer know how to think properly. Others just clump all types of unwanted comments into a single definition covering trolls, idiots, attention seekers, “con” artists, etc.
One interpretation is that the meaningless comment is designed to draw me into responding or acknowledging someone who makes an effort to comment. It may be a first step in a “con”, because replying to a meaningless comment shows that you are a “nice guy”, ingenuous, even a “sitting duck”, so an ideal target.
Defining gratuitous as spam
WPdefinitions tells us that spam is unwanted and unsolicited messages, and in WordPress it can manifest in various forms, such as comment spam, trackback/pingback spam, and registration spam.
- Comment spam is the most common form of spam on WordPress. Spammers use bots to post automated comments on blogs, usually for the purpose of creating backlinks to their own sites. These comments may contain links to malicious or inappropriate sites or simply posts unrelated to the topic of the blog post.
- Trackback spam and pingbacks are mechanisms that let bloggers know when someone else has linked to their articles. However, similar to comments, these systems can be exploited by spammers to generate unwanted links.
- Registration spam is an attempt to create automated user accounts on someones WordPress site. The authors can then use these accounts to post unwanted content or simply inflate the number of users on a site.
Fortunately, there are several strategies to fight spam on WordPress, namely:-
- Anti-spam plugins are available that can assist in blocking spam. One notable example is Akismet, a widely used anti-spam plugin. Akismet verifies comments and trackbacks by comparing them to its extensive spam database, effectively preventing the publication of unwanted content.
- Discussion settings in the WordPress dashboard can be used to control how comments are posted and approved. For example, comments must be approved manually.
- CAPTCHA and human verification plugins can add an extra layer of protection because they require people to prove that they are human before submitting comments or forms.
So are these gratuitous comments just a nuisance?
Initially I just binned these gratuitous or nuisance comments, now I define them as spam.
In fact my very first reaction was to accept these comments, then I decided to bin them. I found “The WordPress Comment System Explained” very informative, and wpbeginner has a webpage “12+ Vital Tips and Tools to Combat Comment Spam in WordPress“.
So the first thing is to check if you use the same credentials for other accounts, that might have been revealed during a data breach. Using outdated plugins, themes, or old versions of WordPress can also lead to vulnerabilities on a site.
The more a website is popular, the more it becomes a target.
From my perspective, the constant desire of these spam comments is to incite a reply.
I never reply, and I just class them as spam, and erase them when I do a cleanup.
Lates update
From 7 July 2024 until 13 August 2024 I’ve received 51 spam comments, which is a substantial increase over the first 6 months of 2024. Also I have started to receive a few comments in a very, very poor, almost incomprehensible English, and also in something that looks vaguely like Latin (but isn’t).
All classed as spam, and deleted at every cleanup and backup.
