Recently I’ve noticed quite a few spambots submitting random comments on a few sites that I run, and while that’s not surprising, the content kind of is. The comments are simple, text only comments mentioning a product of some sort, together with a few random words or characters. No links. Nothing.
My current guess is that the message may be probes to see if there is a word filter active for the words they attempt to submit, and that when they find that the comment goes through, they submit their long list of links and other interesting stuff. The problem is that the sites filter all comments that contain more than one URL and all occurences of “[url”. This has not let a single linked comment through in two years, but now the volume of these comments are getting ridiculous. Guess I’ll have to add some new magic feature with javascript.