contact form spam

I get a lot of spam through my e-mail. This blog gets a fair bit of spam via the comments. Lately, though, I’ve been getting an alarming number of spam messages through the contact form and they all take on the same structure as the message you see above.

When it comes to spam emails and spam comments, it’s perfectly possible that these are completed by bots and not by real people. I can’t imagine these efforts working all that well with anyone who is the least bit web-savvy, but I guess they have to work (at least a little) for these people to put so much effort into telling me about Viagra and hot girls in my area. Because I use comment moderation on this blog, very few of these useless messages ever get publicly displayed.

On the flip side, I don’t think that it would be all that easy to get a spam bot to use the comment form, because it requires the filling out of a few fields, including an — ironically enough — anti-spam skill testing question. I’ve changed this question a couple times, and the result is still the same. Contact form spam still ends up in my mailbox and then I am forced to delete it. When you look at the structure of the spam message, it’s clear that they’re trying to make me click on a certain link, including both HTML and BBCode tags. They even go so far as to tell me that they’re Dr. Steve Jobs. Right. Like I should believe that.

Realistically, how many people do you think would actually click on those Viagra links inside a contact form spam message? Is it really worth the human effort to cut and paste that message into every contact form in the blogosphere?

Have you been hit the same phenomenon? I’d love to hear of any techniques that could reduce this problem while still keeping the lines of communication open with real blog readers.