I get loaded with a ton of spam comments on this site, and, luckily (for me, not for spammers) Akismet is around to deal with 99% of it. Every now and then, I go into Akismet’s spam catcher and manually check it to see if everything truly is spam. So far, I believe I’ve only had to de-spamify one message, which was at best at least half spam anyway. I give the halfies a chance sometimes.

Most of the spam is clearly spam, and only a small amount of it requires a quick read though to verify. Even then, though, it’s pretty easy to discern between spam and not-spam. So my question is this:

Why don’t these spam bots scrape the screen for a real comment, and duplicate that while adding a spam link or two? Sure, it may be a little less linky, gross-wise, but that’s a still net gain because it’s actually going to get past the spam filter. One visible link is better than a hundred links caught in a spam filter, no? That is, of course, assuming that not every comment is hand-filtered.

To that end, why not just write a bot that scrapes the comments from every blog, creates a dictionary of “real” comments, then uses that dictionary to spam.

Disclaimer: I’m not a spammer, I’m just saying…