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Comment spam keeps on increasing, especially in blogs like these. Comment spammers usually use softwares that crawl the web looking for websites that have comment forms and uses some script to fill up the forms and posting them with some link going back to the website of who ever launched the comment spamming software.

A common comment spam I have been seeing is:

I read over your blog, and i found it inquisitive, you may find My Blog interesting.

Where the text My Blog is linked to their website and may include another line after that may also include a link. People are doing this mainly for two purposes.

1. Promoting their blog, the more blogs with their link will invite them to go to there blog that may be promoting a product or service where they could possibly earn extra income.
2. Making more incoming links going to their website, which is one of the Search Engine Optimization techniques to increase rankings in Search Engine Results. The reason why search engines do this is because they believe that if more people link to you, the more credible you are. But it does not really work that way 100%, but that is another topic I will tackle on another posting.

This blog is powered by Wordpress and one way to keep the comments nice and clean, I used the Captcha plugin. Captcha means Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Although there are simple ways of implementing this like just having text displayed on a image where computers cannot normally read it unless some good OCR (Object Character Recognition) software is used. And if the text is kind of twisted, characters turned, variying in colors, using some weird font, even OCR softwares will have a hard time reading the text.

I found the captcha plugin for Wordpress from the blog of El Rincón de Boriel and the plugin works perfectly. If you are running Wordpress and is looking for an excellent way to combat crawling comment spam bots, I like this Wordpress Captcha plugin. But note, this does not prevent manual comment spamming, just have your comments moderated before posting. And just delete them if a manual spam was done.
More about Captcha technology here.