I’m usually pretty good at spotting comment spam when I see it. Normally, that’s because the “name” entered winds up being something suspicious like “Stress Management Ideas” or “Christian Dating” or something that is clearly a business-related title.

Most of the time, if the comment is associated with a name I don’t recognize, then I check out the URL entered at the time the comment was left. I can see that in the moderation section before the comment is turned loose on the world.

If the website listed isn’t a personal blog but is some sort of business site, it gets rejected instantly.

Yesterday, I missed one piece of comment spam — which has since been removed — because it had the name of one of my regular readers. The website was different, which should have been an obvious clue, and the message itself was more along the lines of “Great article, thanks for the info,” which should have been another clue.

But I went with the name alone and assumed.

Lesson learned. You have to be increasingly more careful, especially if you aren’t willing to automatically inflict that annoying “Captcha” thing on everyone across the board. And at this point, I’m still not there.

There are certain keywords that will automatically trigger a Captcha check, but those are words that tend to be more common in spam comment messages. Even more annoying, it makes me go through the same verification, even when I’m signed in to this blog. How dare that little plugin try to second guess the guy who installed it!

Anyway, I’ll try to be more careful. If you find any comments with your name and you think they’re suspect, let me know.