Gosh spammers suck! (lol)

I was working on a client's site just today and I noticed that the spammers have gotten extremely clever. They now post comments that if you are not careful you just might let them in to run amuck on your site. I was reading comments that were almost what you'd expect to hear from your real comment posters. They cultivate brilliant automated messages that now stroke your ego, in hopes that the you will be so taken by their positive comments that you'll click "Approve" and let them in.

I wish you all could read the comments, they said things like...

Wow! What a great article. I am lucky to have found such an informative article.

Great site! I'm lucky to have found you on Google!

oh hold on (lol) here is one of my favorites

I totally disagree with this article. Although you have some very valid points, I disagree with the major points of the article.

Quite clever guys, but you cant fool me! I think its quite funny actually. The reason why they do this is to get you to approve their comments (my goodness you are moderating your comments right?!) and once you make a mistake and approve their "spam" they can post advertisements all over your blog. Its quite annoying but just as you have spammers you have spam fighters here to save the day. So no fret, you can significantly reduce your spam by following these steps.

• Sort The Spam - Check Their Names: The first thing you probably need to do is sort through the spam to find your legitimate comments. If you can, sort the comments by author. If their names are "payday loans" or "best gaming site", you already know to mark this as spam.
• Beware of Long Web Addresses - Now most "real" people won't fill in their website information because they either don't have one or they don't feel the need to supply one. But spammers? Oh TRUST that they will definitely leave their web site address. So with your comments sorted by author, check to see if a website is supplied. If it is a very long address then mark it as spam. Most people if they have a website just type in "www.mywebsite.com"
• Check that IP - Next if you are still having problems sorting through the spam, check the IP address (an ID that identifies their location) of the suspect commenter, copy the ip address and perform a search in your "spam" comment folder. If that ip shows up there or if the ip address changed but the name is still the same...mark it as spam.
• What Article? - If you are still unsure if the comment is legit, check the comments themselves. If the comment is filled with references to items such as "games", "purses" or "money" then its obvious that its spam. But if you don't see any of those key words, check to see if the comment does not address the specifics of the article and if the commenter calls it "the article" or "the post" then you can mark it as spam.
• Get a Captcha - Now that you have sorted through your spam, you have to stop spammers from causing you stress. You need to install a plugin called a captcha. If you use a content management system (CMS) like Joomla or Wordpress you can easily search for "captcha" and install it on your site. If you don't use a CMS, then you have to install the captcha manually, the official captcha site is http://www.captcha.net/. Add captchas to ALL of your forms where users have to submit data except for logins and password resets.

Spam Fighters: 1

Spammers: 0