Since I started this blog I’ve gotten a lot of spam comments, which the WordPress plugins deal with quite effectively for the most part. They are generally really lazy — some are just straight up “click here for X”. Others try to pose as legitimate comments but they do so in such a lazy, obvious way that the spam filter can catch all of them. Here are some examples:

• Good post! We are linking to this particularly great post on our site. Keep up the great writing.
• This article is both accurate and engaging. I’m impressed by how useful the whole website is.
• Hi, just wanted to mention, I enjoyed this blog post. It was practical. Keep on posting!

These comments take advantage of the fact that you can leave a website in your display name when you post.

Today, though, I had this comment on the Elfaria II post which was initially not caught by the spam filter:

Of course once you see the display name and the e-mail address it’s obvious spam, but clearly this is an AI-written response. I think maybe I felt like something was off from the way it was written, but I nearly hit “approve” before I noticed the username.

When I looked in my spam folder I saw that these kind of comments had been coming in for a while now. Some examples:

• That’s a really interesting bit of history about Shiozawa Kaneto’s involvement. It’s amazing how many different media tie-ins these older games had back then. (on Gate Keepers)
• That’s a really interesting point about it being Sega’s only Master System RPG – I remember hearing about that back then, it’s amazing how different the console landscape was! (on Phantasy Star)
• Absolutely, it felt like nothing else on the Famicom at the time. The world design and story were just incredibly immersive. (On Final Fantasy)

It seems like they started coming in around January of this year.

I’m not sure how effective this can really be because there’s no point in the spam comment if there isn’t a link to some kind of scam/honeypot, which makes it pretty easy to identify (even by a spam filter). I suppose if someone is running a larger blog where they don’t read all the comments it might work?

(My blog does not use AI at all for any posts or images.)