From a Rusty Elliot Harold entry titled,
Comment Spam Gets Trickier
:
Comment spammers are copying sentences out of legitimate comments and resubmitting them with a link or two changed. If you're not careful, this can even fool a human inspection since the spam is thereby on topic and relevant. If it comes a couple of months after an original article was posted that received a lot of comments, it's very easy to miss.
There was a time when email spam filters were atrocious and all manner of spam got through. The internet arms race has largely closed that hole. I use gmail for my business email as they are more efficient than I am, or any system I can set up, for filtering email. I am basically outsourcing it - at no cost to myself.
SSR is a closed system and had anonymous commenting for a while, but scoop's filtering of comments is pretty poor. IIRC hillct has done an akismet plugin for scoop. Akismet is another example of the internet outsourcing the filtering and taking advantages of information of scale (in bad information in this case) to get better results.
One of the more recent tricks has been images as email filters didn't check images too closely. The method reported by Elliot Harold is pretty slick, there will come a time when this arms race between filters will lead to the electronic humans that answer your video phones which Greg Egan loves to pepper his novels and short stories with.
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