spammers suck

[ratcreature]

There has been a sharp increase in spam comments in my LJ and an also some on DW. I screen anon comments, but having to delete amd report bunches of them is getting rather tedious. Okay, it's a couple every day, so not a flood, precisely, but still. I don't like the idea of turning off anon comments entirely, but if this keeps up, I'm not sure what else to do. Has anyone else noticed more spam than usual recently, or is it just me?

Comments

[astridv]

I not only screen anon comments, I also log their IPs *and* I got captcha turned on. In spite of all those hoops to jump through, I got three or four spam comments in the last week or two. Which makes me wonder about the kind of dedicated-yet-deeply-stupid spammer we're dealing here. I'm assuming a bot can't get past the captcha? So it's gotta be a real person? Who should know there's no way in hell their blatant spam comment will ever get unscreened anyway so why waste both our time. Boggling.

eta: those were all LJ, nothing on DW.

[ratcreature]

I've heard that some captcha methods are broken and can be solved by bot, though I suppose it could also be outsourced and they pay humans to solve captchas en masse, which then are reported back to the spam bot or something. Either way it's depressing. But like you I'm truly baffled what is gained. I mean, they don't even all have links in them. Sometimes it's just random sentences. It makes no sense.