From Praneeth's blog:
I guess spam guys are running a marathon. From past two days I've been getting lots of spam comments(mortgage, furniture, hotgirls and what not) to my email..Just today I recieved like 6 spam comments. Ofcourse I've deleted them..This never happend to me.Earlier, I used to get once in a while which I totally understand but 6 in a day is way too much. Did any of you face similar kinda situation? Is there any solution?
I've been getting an increased amount of comment spam also. It's hard to avoid this kind of spam because the spammers are using the same techniques that we are using for systems integration to deliver the spam.
We have been able to grab search results from sources such as Google, Yahoo and other places because we have studied their API's and know the correct way to cause the source to do something useful for us. We are also able to use proxy pages to simulate a user accessing a website via a server.
Spammers are familiar with popular blog engines such as Movable Type, WordPress, and others. Using this familiarity, spammers create robots that simulate real visitors in order to crawl through blog sites and post spam with ease.
I think I'll call these robots SPLAGBOTS. This is just a randomly created word that is just coincidently reminiscient of the words spam, blog, and robots all shoved together...just like Ajax "isn't" actually an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript And XML.
Since Splagbots try to impersonate real people in the way they submit comment spam, the best way (currently) to fight them is to have the server evaluate their behavior and respond in a way that keeps the spam at bay.
For example, splagbots are incredibly fast in their crawling and posting of comment spam. Speed is necessary because the spammer's goal is to submit spam as fast as possible (faster means more spam reaches people). The server could have a mechanism to detect activity that is occurring too fast for a human and then take actions such as automatically deleting the comment or adding the splagbots ip address to a blacklist.