Mollom public beta launches today. This is the web services developed by Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen that works to prevent comment and contact form spam. It's been running on this site and konigi for the past several months and works a charm. Check it out.

The new fashion of complimentary comment spamming is kind of a pain to deal with. These are the comments that say things like the following:

"Great, article. I bookmarked it."

"Thanks for the info. Reading the blogs provide much needed support."

"Thanks for this post"

"Thank you for the wonderful Blog.."

Make no mistake about it. While the comments seem innocuous, they are spam. Following the URL associated with the user confirms that they're pointing to some spam farm. But the tough part, is that these are not spam farms for your typical, ahem, prescription medications for men. A lot of the sites these links are pointing to look like legitimate blogs, but they're not. Others look legit, but are in foreign languages, so I can't tell what they're hawking.

Monitoring the whole thing is rather a time suck, but I've gotten to the point where I'm just frustrated by having to see these things litter my comments. It's been a few good years having Akisment flag the comments that are clearly spam, but the clever tactics of this new phase of spammers looks too real, and might in fact be getting generated by this new workforce of human spammers I've been reading about.

So from now on, I'm going to actually hover over links for these short 1-3 sentence compliment spams, and if anything looks even remotely suspicious, it's getting marked as spam by my comment spam module. Hopefully, if more people do this work of crowdsourcing the spam marking, more of the culprits will get blacklisted and be prevented from re-appearing on our sites. Short, complimentary commenters beware. Your days are numbered, and you haven't defeated me yet.