If you want to learn more, this formatting is called "spintax" and is supported by a lot of the blackhat SEO tools.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning

It's supported by all blackhat tools used for posting.

Not the first time someone's slipped up [1].

[1] http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ExposedABlogCommentSpammersSou...

Just plain old article spinning; format looks like its meant for Scrapebox.

This is some pretty noobish stuff. A more effective way to decrease moderation is to make comments talking about how you enjoyed the article and linked to their blog. You then setup a script on your site to detect referral traffic from /wp-admin, etc., pull the rss feed for their site and then inject their latest blog post in the page content/side bar (e.g. Recommended Reading!). Drop an evercookie so it shows up if they come back.

I'm more concerned at the long vertical rows of spaces and |'s. How does that happen by chance?

Might be the pattern writer having some fun? Given the braces and bars, they wouldn't even result in any patterns in the output.

So how come most of the lines don't have a link to their website? I mean most of the lines congratulate the author for their excellent blog post.. Is that really spam?

Typically they'll submit links in the "Link" or "Name" field.

But as you say the majority of spam submissions will actually include a link in the body of the comment too.

(Actually many comments include the link with numerous variations: BBCode, HTML, and even Markdown formatted. As a heuristic it is easy to write off spam that uses three or more different linking stratagies - I do that in my blog-spam detection service @ http://blogspam.net/ )

I see what you did there ;-) But thanks for the explanation

spammed this post about spam with his anti-spam service?

edit: wordpress plugin looks perfect for a few of my blogs

Many times they post just to see if the blog has auto approval or not. Or if the blog has auto approval after 1 approved post they'll post an innocuous one then later come back with the links once they'll get auto approved.

Yes, the comment author links the page in their profile or sig (depending on the platform), posting generic praise comments is a huge chance they won't be deleted.

The links are sent in the URL field, not in the comment contents.

Is there a good plugin for wordpress that just deletes any post coming in with URL fields? I don't have interface for the URL field in my blog, so any comment submitting one is always coming from a spam script.

I'm not familiar with such a plugin, but for a small donation I'm sure myself/others reading here could write it for you :)

UPDATE: I've written the trivial plugin, but only tested it a little: https://github.com/skx/wordpress-no-links

Wow, thanks! :)

That's non-standard functionality so I doubt there is a plugin that does that; but it would be pretty trivial to write.

Why do spammers continue to do this? Since the panda / penguin updates, I presumed Google no longer counted links from blog comments, even if they were do-follow links.

On the other hand, you now have something that could easily be turned into a regex for detecting spam.

You can't process a context-free grammar with a DFA.