Warning: Fling.com Comment Bots are Intelligent

I relish new comments and I always want to interact with them and thank people for taking the time to post.

So when I come across a few new commenters with believable comments, I usually check their website to see who they are. When I had a comment from Caitlyn Reynolds with a Gravatar it seemed legit, until I checked ‘her’ site, which leads to a believable site of girl (that matches the gravatar pic) taking pictures of successively removing her clothes.

If you click on any of the images, it will redirect you to Fling dot com, a website dedicated to making, uh, flings more easy. Think adult friend finder. I let it slide to see if it were a one time thing, or if it would continue.

Today, I made a new post, and within 30 seconds it already had comments really darn relevant to what the article was talking about. So, while I’m impressed by the parsing algorithm of the bot, it was a brand new user, yet the Gravatar was the same as Caitlyn from before (but with the name Trish Baker). Site redirects to the same Fling nonsense as above.

I’m not sure if this is a brand new thing or an old thing that I’ve simply never run into before, but since Askimet doesn’t seem to be picking it up (and Askimet has always been awesome for comment spam) I hope the Automattic team is working on it.

So far, hitting the spam button in Askimet seems to work. But I thought I’d give a heads up to all bloggers, especially Wordpress users out there (although I’ve seen the bots creeping in even on Wil Wheaton’s Typepad site, check the commenter Alisa Terry).