Rise Of Russian Comment Spam
I am seeing a steady and alarming rise of russian comment spams. Often people will not understand a comment in a foreign language and may approve it in a hurry. Such comment spams when translated may cause embarrassment for the blogger and also provide unwanted boost to comment spammers. I have a recommendation. Let's first look at this recent example on my blog (NSFW):
Эротика на DVD Русское Секс Видео - Русский секс - гигабайты порно видео
Анальный секс
Групповой секс
Гей видео
Домашнее и любительское
Кабинки и раздевалки
Классический секс
Короткие юбки
Лесбиянки
Мастурбация
Нудисты
Общение со зрителем
Писающие
Подглядывания
Позирование
Разврат
Сборники
Секс на природе
Семейный секс
Скрытая камера
Трио
Фетиш
Эксгибиционисты, на улице
Экстрим
Юмор и сатира
I will just provide the first few lines of this comment translated using the Google translator:
Erotic on DVD Russian Sex Video-Russian sex-gigabytes porn video
Fudgepacking
Group sex
Gay Videos
Family and amateur
Rooms and clothing
Classic sex
The bottomline is that comment spams are not limited to English. It is a global problem and targeted at a global audience. If you find comments in a language you don't understand then you have two options:
1. Translate it and then approve it if appropriate
2. Delete it if you don't have the time to verify; don't approve it by default.
Let me know what are your thoughts on this.
Filed under Headline News, How To, Pro Blogging, Spam Watch, Web, Web 2.0, Web Services, WordPress | 
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August 12th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Well, if I can’t make out what the commenter says (if it’s not in one of the languages I speak), chances are my readers won’t either.
To the bin.
August 12th, 2007 at 10:15 am
The solution is simple if you have a blog in a single language like English. However if you use my Translator plugin which provides automatic translation of your blog in up to 32 languages, then you do have to consider your global audience. For example this blog has already served over 2 million non-English visitors since May (look in the top right corner for the current stats). So I cannot simply delete a comment because it is written in say Spanish or Russian. I have to translate it to find out what it says before I delete or approve. However thanks to my Comment Guard plugin all automated comment spams are caught even before it reaches me.
August 12th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Spammers never give up, and problems force us to find a way to overcome.
The idea is simple and seems ~OK. However, it’s a serious server load I guess.
First of all, we don’t need to translate the whole message. I think the old solutions does this too: A multi-language badwords database. This has some side-effects too: A user might want to say “it’s a f***ing good program!”, and our control mechanism probably eleminates this comment, which shouldn’t has been.
But we still has a chance to improve it: The idea could be “
if more than x badword(s)“; or a much better one: “the ratio of badwords to word count”I guess this hits the spammers algorithm
November 10th, 2007 at 2:01 am
Our solution will be quite simple for the moment, delete any comment we don’t understand. Those that got past the anti-spam filter, anyway.