Comment-Spam Bots are Amazingly Quick and Efficient

MRW the Comment-Spam Bots started posting 3 hours after the site was made.

So I wasn’t expecting to post something so quickly, but this really jumped out at me: the speed of Comment-Spam Bots is freaking amazing.

I registered this brand-new domain name, created a new web hosting account with a provider I have never used before, installed WordPress, manually pointed the new domain name at my new host’s DNS servers, and then wrote my first posting (a “Welcome” post) all within the last 3 hours. And yet, two Bots have already comment-spammed my initial post.

Now, I wasn’t planning on having comments here for quite a while (if ever – with Twitter and Facebook, I’m rather wondering what’s the point), but the speed with which the bots somehow found this site (which has not been linked to by anything yet, and can’t possibly be in any search engines at this time) and started posting their nonsense is, frankly, astonishing to me. That itself warrants some thought and research.

Of course, their comments never saw the light of day, and all it resulted in was me turning off comments immediately rather than later this week. This site explains how to do so in WordPress about as well as anywhere for new posts going forward; for existing posts go to Quick Edit (not Edit) for the post and uncheck “Allow Comments.”

But still, it just goes to show there’s nothing more ruthlessly efficient than automated malware chasing a buck.