After it seemed that the comment spam problem was somehow getting under control (I don't have hard figures on that, but most blogs I visit seem to have good enough anti-spam techniques in place), we have now context-sensitive spam comments… An example which was made to my last post:
So now what? Have you bought the Eye TV or are you still planning for that? Otherwise thnx for the information as I was just palnning to either upgrade my system or Looking in to buy a TV.
Keep up the good work!!
Ok, “keep up the good work” was very suspicious, and the link to some hormone website on the URL field made it pretty clear. But apart from that? It's totally related to the post, he even asks me a related question, so that I may feel obliged to answer and it doesn't have dozens of links included, etc..
This was obviously a manual job, therefore none of the anti-spam techniques (except URL blacklisting) helps here. I am maybe getting 3-4 such comments in a week, so deleting them is, thanks to our one-click-deletion links, not much work. But if that increases, it could get really annoying, especially because you can't detect them as spam on the first spot. OTOH, all those comments are so meaningless, even if they weren't spam and are somehow context-related, I don't have a problem deleting them. If you have nothing new to say, just don't comment :)
Maybe akismet is faster/better in detecting those comments ('cause of more widespread URL blacklisting collection or sth. similar), should check it some day.
PS: We don't have a spam problem in general, our system catches maybe 99.5% of all spam comments (without using captchas, btw), it's just those manual spam comments which are worrying me a little :)
Update: Shame on me :) The comment form didn't work, 'cause I black-listed this comment itself out… (spam.com was blacklisted, which matched on spam-comments in the url). Great. I improved now my regexes and will also improve the referrer-black-lister itself. Sorry for all those who wanted to comment.
Update II: Implemented akismet into Flux CMS and already it already caught the first hand crafted spam comment. cool stuff :)