Can anyone tell me the point of this?

[wordmunger]

Okay, I understand that there's always going to be spam, but can anyone tell me why anyone would bother with this:

comments on a recent blog post of mine

Scroll down to the comments section: there are several comments with no contact information, and no text. What's the point? I could see it if they were trying to advertise poker, or implants, or whatever, but there's just nothing there. I get about 4 or 5 of these an hour.

I can't even filter or blacklist the comments, because there's nothing to filter.

 

[rtdgoldfish]

Maybe it's just an error somewhere in the comment posting system?? Sometimes when I use Safari to post on certain sites, it shows up blank even though I typed a reply.

 

[wordmunger]

Maybe it's just an error somewhere in the comment posting system?? Sometimes when I use Safari to post on certain sites, it shows up blank even though I typed a reply.

I'm pretty sure it's not that. This is clearly some sort of spam: the same IP address (or same plus one digit) posting the same blank "message" over and over again. I suppose it could be a broken spambot, though.

 

[whocares]

How 'bout IP filtering?

 

[edesignuk]

Could be a search engine spider. When you're an admin of a forum running vB you can see what IP address are doing what on your forums, I quite often see Google Spider IP's trying to reply to posts and such, could be the same case here (because unlike vB, registration is not required to post a comment I assume?).

 

[wordmunger]

How 'bout IP filtering?

Hmmm... IP filtering doesn't seem to be working on WordPress right now. I'm flagging a few of them as "spam." I'm not quite sure how the WordPress spam filter works.

Also, the IP varies by a digit each time, so it won't be a perfect solution. This is another thing that makes me suspect it's not a search engine robot.

 

[stoid]

Hmmm... IP filtering doesn't seem to be working on WordPress right now. I'm flagging a few of them as "spam." I'm not quite sure how the WordPress spam filter works.

Also, the IP varies by a digit each time, so it won't be a perfect solution. This is another thing that makes me suspect it's not a search engine robot.

If by changing one each time you mean going from 10.10.10.5 to 10.10.10.6 you should be alright. I would think that you should be able to specify blocking all IPs that are 10.10.10.xxx to solve that problem. (Obviously the 10.10.10 is just for the example, and the first three could be anything).

 

[wordmunger]

Okay, here's an interesting tidbit. The IP address resolves to mthmarketing.com, which claims to be a member of http://www.ordb.org/, which as far as I know is a legitimate spam-fighting group. So either the spammers are spoofing a legitimate IP, or mthmarketing is a bunch of hypocrites.

Stoid, thanks for the tip. But IP filtering isn't working at all on my site right now. I think that's something I need to take up with the WordPress people directly.

 

[jeremy.king]

Its not very complete server side validation - thats for sure. Post #7 was from me and all I did was put a space in each field. Perhaps this can be customized, or you could let Word Press know that they should trim the fields they validate.