I don’t get it but do

I’ve never understood the point of comment spam. If anything gets past spam filters, the blogger is likely to delete it—or should—so what can spammers possibly gain?

Ever since I turned off comment word verification a couple months ago, following several requests to do so, I’ve received hundreds of comments, the vast majority of which have been spam. I don’t receive email notification of all spam comments, but about 80% of the comment notifications I’ve received by email since turning off word verification have been for spam comments (according to my rough count). There are some such notifications every single day; some days it can be several dozen, others days only a few. Also, for every ten spam comments I receive an email notification about, there are two or three that are just sent to my Blogger spam folder without a notification.

Blogger’s built-in spam filters have caught all but a handful of spam comments, and a few of the ones that weren’t caught weren’t obviously spam at first. So, the filtering system is highly effective. So again, what on earth do spammers gain?

Spam comments tend to target the same old blog posts over and over again, so much so that I may delete the “Most Popular Posts” list on the righthand sidebar because the list is often skewed by spam comment attacks. I haven’t done so yet because sometimes it’s unaffected.

One last thing that’s curious about attempted spam comments: On this blog, they’re almost always from “Anonymous”, while spam comment attacks on my podcast sites tend to be from named “people”, however absurd the name is or obviously “borrowed” the photo of the supposed commenter is.

So I know all this, various filters catch the spam attacks, and the spammers gain nothing. So, I may get a lot spam, but I don’t get why they bother. Just one of those mysteries of (modern) life, I guess.