Deleting a lot of spam recently – I hope it’s spam.
If you’ve made a comment lately and had it deleted, I apologize. Most likely, all of the spam I’ve deleted is actually spam, but they’ve been getting tricky lately and looking legit, for the most part. The latest was a comment saying that the site was slow, and yes, I’ve noticed that a few times lately, but the address that the name would link to was VERY spammy-looking. Quick tip: If you spell iPhone in your address with a zero, you’ll be suspected of being a spammer.
One recent spam “complained” that my blog had too many words and only 2 images. That comment looks rather out of place on a COMIC website, where most of the content is IMAGES. Of course that comment entered a spammy-looking address in the url field of the comment form. That’s how spams work; they trick people into visiting their websites, often with innocent-looking comments. Sometimes those comments look downright out of place or extremely vague. A program is pasting them in, after all.
So in other words, if I deleted a legitimate comment, it was vague or looked out of place. Oh, and if you see a possibly-spammy comment on your own website, don’t visit their address. Instead, if you must verify its spamminess, enter the address into Google and see what it says about it. Antivirus programs(like Norton) might even pop up a comment about the site inside the search results page.
UPDATE(next day): Turns out that my anti-spam plugin, Akismet, somehow got deactivated. Might have been a bad upgrade or something. Might be related to that site-wide issue I had recently(lasted a few hours late at night) that could have been caused by a bad backup(likely backed up during an upgrade, then used a few days later). I’ve re-activated the plugin and now appreciate its hard work even more. I was really suspicious after deleting 5 spams manually today.