An interesting way to deal with comment spam? (just 4 fun)

[Devin_Anderson]

About two weeks back I set up a new website called www.gamsatsamplequestions.co.uk.  It's a blog where, once a day, I post a set of verbal comprehension-style questions to help students prepare for the GAMSAT (the graduate entry to medicine exam used by universities in UK, Ireland and Australia.)

Along with rising traffic, I've recently started to receive spam comments. Before going ahead and activating Akismet or some other spam-blocking app I thought I might have a bit of fun with them..

I took my favourite spam comment (one allegedly about SEO) and wrote up some questions to turn it into a sample GAMSAT reading comprehension

It's not the most efficient way of moderating spam comments, and my not-so-subtle bitter rantings are unlikely to deter any future spammers, but I nonetheless had a little bit of fun doing it..

So, my question is, has anybody else experimented with interesting or unique ways of dealing with comment spam?

E.g. created a directory of all the people who spam commented you / donated their email addresses to hordes of email marketers / replied with a kindly worded email expressing concern for their well being..

Has anyone stumbled upon anything more fun/efficient than the akismet-style plugins?

[zigojacko]

Whilst I like your approach in how you turned the blog comment spam into a relevant piece of content for your target audience, any process in outing comment spammers or any other associated processes will result in a lot of wasted time.

Comment spam is deployed in bulk, hitting millions of domains at once. The comments will largely be made using gmail email addresses so that the blog owner can't easily just ban the email domain from posting due to legitimate users of gmail. The entire process is automated, using scrapers, bots or other 'black-hat' software. The email addresses are widely not even maintained (real) - it is really of no bother to the creators, if the email address is added to mass marketing / email lists as whoever is employing them for mass spamming will own hundreds of thousands of email addresses with new ones being created every day.

There really isn't any effective way of manually combating spam, not one that most can really justify the use of their time dealing with... Unfortunately.