I’ve been receiving a lot of comment spam recently in the form of one sentence comments that might (or might not) apply to my posts.

Usually, the comments appear on posts in the archive and contain elements in common — such as smiley faces — that make me think that someone or some entity is trying to gain some sort of SEO advantage by leaving the comments and a link to their various websites.

I try to catch spammy comments and mark them as such to help Akismet learn of new spammers, but I have been getting a handful of such comments daily. Usually the comments come in overnight, so I assume they are being done from someplace overseas during their local daytime hours.

The comments aren’t necessarily bad or spammy in themselves. It’s just the fact that they are linking to spammy sites. I don’t want to encourage the spammers to continue leaving comments that I have to remove on a daily basis.

Should I keep marking the comments that are half-way on point as spam?

Should I break their URLS and keep the comment that might make sense, but that doesn’t add much to the conversation?

Is there some sort of WordPress plug-in that might help with the situation?

Let me know by leaving a comment if you’ve experienced the same issue and have found a way to counteract the situation.

Technorati Tags: blogging, spam

Indiana has a tough anti-spam law in the Indiana Code 24-5-22, et seq. titled “Deceptive Commercial Electronic Mail.”  It provides for presumptive damages and reasonable attorneys fees.

I can’t find that anyone has filed a law suit in Indiana that has resulted in an appeals court decision doing a quick check using Casemaker.

I wonder if anyone in Indiana has had any success in obtaining a judgment against a spammer?

The tougher question would be whether anyone was able to collect on such a judgment if they did obtain one.

It seems that with all of the spam flying through the internet, someone would have used this law against a spammer or two.

Technorati Tags: Deceptive Commerical Electronic Mail, I.C. 24-5-22, Indiana Code

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