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What to do with foreign language spam?

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spamI guess anyone who runs a WordPress blog will have noticed the recent flood of Russian comment spam. Like a lot of English spam, the comments appear to be hand-written, and can almost pass as regular comments. The problem therefore is how to figure out whether or not a message is spam.

Something similar has happened on Gmail, where my spam box is usually full of Chinese characters. Gmail’s spam filter is incredibly accurate, so I usually simply delete everything in my spam folder. With blog comments however, things are a little more tricky.

Approve, mark as spam or delete?

I could simply mark every single comment written in a language I don’t know as spam. But with the way Akismet works, that might get honest commenters banned. There are both Russian and Chinese translations of WP-Cumulus, and chances are the people using those will occasionally try to contact me. Flagging a comment as spam sends a message to Aksimet’s central server, and if enough people do this, foreign bloggers may end up being unable to comment on half the blogs out there.

So I don’t want to ‘mark’ comments simply because of the language they’re written in. That leaves me with running every single comment trough Babelfish or something similar, and manually determining whether or not they’re spam. But that’s a lot of work, and machine translations can be very hard to interpret.

Deleting as a compromise

Currently, I delete most of these comments. This blog is in English, so Russian, Spanish or Chinese comments are probably of little use to most of my readership. And if I don’t understand what they’re saying I won’t be able to respond to them. By ‘just’ deleting them I’m making sure their authors won’t get wrongfully flagged with Akismet. The problem with this approach however is that the comments that are spam also don’t get marked as such. Leaving the spammer to spam another day.

So, how do you deal with foreign language comments? Are there any Russian or Chinese commenters out there who’ve had trouble with Akismet?


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