I've received numerous purposely mis-spelled comments from visitors. Should I st

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   Diana Grantposted 9 years ago

   I've received numerous purposely mis-spelled comments from visitors. Should I still approve them?
   
   I think they might all be from the same source, as each comment has just one or two wrongly transposed letters in a word, and I'm beginning to think I am looking at some coded message. 
   
   I have approved some of them, but, as I got about 8 today, each one from a non-Hubber and each one with similar types of error, I feel very suspicious and wonder if it's some kind of hack that I don't know about. I don't know whether it's spam, as some (but not all) of the comments are quite normal apart from the spelling, quantity and fact that they are not from Hubbers.

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   rebekahELLEposted 9 years ago

   I saw a forum thread about this same issue very recently.  I would mark each comment as spam that appears this way.  It looks like someone is playing games.

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      Diana Grantposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      That's interesting - how would I find the thread? I did try to see if anyone else had written about this before I posted

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      naturegirl7sposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      It was a short thread about 3 days ago. Matt the moderator said to mark them as spam so that the HP team could investigate the sender.

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   naturegirl7sposted 9 years ago

   Those seem to be going around. The 6 or more I received seemed like good comments except they addressed the wrong person or went on about something similar to the subject of the hub. Mine seemed to be copied from other places and also had the misspelled words. They are spam. Mine were on my original account where I had not clicked moderation. Now this person's or people's comments will not be seen until I approve them.

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      Diana Grantposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      I had my moderation switched on, so saw them before allowing them. But what would be the motive for making comments but wrongly spelling them?  I still feel it could be some kind of code

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      naturegirl7sposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Who knows, maybe it's a secret code. I've received emails with certain letters capitalized or colored that spell out spam items and where to get them. Perhaps these are done that way, but the color wasn't allowed in HP comments.

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   Virginia Allainposted 9 years ago

   I had huge batches of these for about 4 days. I deleted all of them, then they stopped coming.
   Like you, I worried that they might be considered spam by google and affect my hub credibility. Some were quite off topic.

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      Diana Grantposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Well, they certainly seem to be doing the rounds.  But you are wrong about me worrying that Google might consider them as spam which might affect my cred.  I didn't even consider that Google would be involved.  Yes, a couple of mine were off topic

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   connorjposted 9 years ago

   I believe indeed it is a type of SPAM. I too have received these...

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   Philanthropy2012posted 9 years ago

   I just checked my comments and found over 30 comments, each with a clear spelling mistake, and most (but strangely, not all) were completely irrelevant and often didn't make any sense at all.
   
   Apart from no-life trolls (of which there are many) trying out new tactics, I can only imagine that spamming featured hubs with spelling errors is a method that other upcoming websites (or more plainly, sworn enemies of HubPages) implement to reduce the general quality of articles for search engines. I suspect that Google detects spelling errors and ranks them down accordingly.
   
   With that said, I doubt that the perpetrators realise that most people have their comments requiring an approval, meaning that this little tactic will amount to nothing.
   
   More to the point, I suspect they strike randomly, meaning that most of the comments they post will never even be read by the authors of the articles (who have long hung up their pens).

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      Diana Grantposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      I think you are right, but part of me thinks there is some sort of coded communication passing between the spammers....call me a conspiracy theorist if you like!

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      Philanthropy2012posted 9 years agoin reply to this

      Perhaps, though It's hard to think what such a code might achieve. On the plus side, whoever has invented the comments is clearly quite colourful; one of the comments I received ended in "how many words can a word smith smith?" Move over, woodchuck!

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   The Examiner-1posted 9 years ago

   Perhaps they are robotic, things like spelling always give them away.

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      Diana Grantposted 9 years agoin reply to this

      No, these are not accidental mis-spellings - most comments have everything spelt correctly except for one or two words with transposed letters which don't look like accidents.  I think Philanthropy2012 may have the right answer

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