Now that my site is back up, spambots are bludgeoning it with comment spam, which was also true in my Movable Type days. Luckily I have things set here to require my approval before allowing them to appear on my pages. This stops most spambots dead in their tracks. Nor is it a major inconvenience for my friends because, once they are to rpproved by me to comment, WordPress remembers the IP addresses and related information they use and doesn’t require approval again.
Now I can look at their activities in the abstract. They’ve gotten smarter than they were a couple of years ago. The grasp of English has improved, mostly. But they seem to be especially conspicuous for three reasons:
- They never say anything specific about what I’ve written. Instead they mostly complement me on an interesting post but that’s it.
- Either that or they ramble on about search engine optimization and how we should cooperate to game the system.
- They always, always, always have a URL somewhere.