I've been remiss in deleting spam from my moderated-comments queue in the past month-plus; as of yesterday, there were over 13,000 comments in the queue. I've been plowing through them—only 6500 or so to go!—and rescuing the few that aren't spam; apologies to those of you whose comments have been languishing.<\/p>\n
Anyway, as usual when I'm deleting comment spam, I can't help but think that I could write a way better spam-comment generator than the spambots are using.<\/p>\n
I guess it depends on one's goal. If I were writing a spambot, I would want its comments to look as much like real comments as possible, to make comment moderators have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether they were real comments or not.<\/p>\n
When there are, say, two thousand comments in a five-day period that all say variations on “Lindsay Lohan Goes to Rehab Today” (in a blog that has never once mentioned Lindsay Lohan until now), it takes me less than a second per comment to skim through a hundred at a time and zap them all.<\/p>\n
I suppose the people operating the spambots don't care about this kind of thing. They want to make it hard for automated spam-recognition systems to detect the spam, so they have systems that replace words and phrases in a given piece of spam with synonyms, but I guess they don't really care whether the spam comments look like reasonable comments to a human.<\/p>\n
But I've heard it suggested that we'll get to strong AI via the struggle between spammers (to get their spam posted) and spam-detection systems. And I don't think the spammers are really doing their part here.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I'm not gonna post my ideas about how to make comment spam read more like real comments, on the unlikely chance that a spambot writer might (a) not have thought of these ideas, and (b) decide to implement them. But my ideas aren't anything revolutionary; they're based partly on stuff I've known about since college.<\/p>\n
So as soon as some spambot writer does start caring about realistic comments, my workload in fighting spam is going to go way up.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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