However, I’ve been struck recently by seemingly pointless spam comments. They are clearly generated by a bot, but they don’t include any kind of backlink… what’s the purpose of that?

Pointless Spam Comment from Swiss Dude

I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments lately that follow a simple pattern. They are clearly generated by some sort of script that searches for a random phrase, picks a result, and then automatically submits a comment based on the title information in the page.

Here’s a sample comment.

Hey! I came across your blog posting after searching for and your post on Badge | Web Cash makes an interesting read. Thanks for sharing. I will research more next Friday when I have the day off.

It seems that a phrase should be inserted in between “searching for” and “and your post.” Another dead give away that this is a bot is that it mentions my post on “Badge | Web Cash.”

It’s clearly copied right out of the title tag for the pages. These include the blog name (Web Cash) at the end, where-as the on-page titles don’t. And no human in his right mind would reference a post title like that.

Here’s another example comment, which seems to have gone through the bot script better.

Hello webmaster I found your blog on Google while searching for background check and your post regarding Modify a WordPress RSS Feed Widget with Rel=Nofollow | Web Cash looks very interesting for me. Ive bookmarked the post in my digg account.

Again, the title appears verbatim from the <title> element. The name that is used also appears to line up with the search phrase used (in this case, background check).

So I guess the script is designed to take a phrase you are trying to optimize for, search for that phrase, and spam all the results with a comment.

But Some Comments Have No Link…

Some of these comments have a link filled into the URI section. This is logical. If a bot is going to spider through my site and dump random comments it ought to leave a link back to the original site… or it’s just wasting it’s time.

Yet a lot of these comments (all seemingly coming from “Swiss Dude”) have no link attached to them. I guess maybe the guy botched some of the settings and screwed up the script.

Ah well. All I can say is – thank goodness for Akismet. If I had to wade through all these comments on a daily (hourly?) basis, I’d probably have commenting turned off. As it stands, Akismet picks up about 95% of the trash that comes in – and the rest is inane enough that I just let it go.

There are plenty of reasons you’d want to do this. Perhaps you want to send a newsletter to your users. Or you want people to be able to leave feedback through e-mail. Or you just want your users to be able to e-mail the page (or a link to it) to a friend.

How do we do this? The mail() function.

While there are more in depth and robust ways to send e-mail with PHP, the simplest method is to use the mail() function. In most cases this is all you need to send plain text e-mail to a number of recipients.

Let’s see how this function works by creating a form that lets the user “Share This Article” – e-mail a link of the current article to a friend.

Examining the Mail Function

First, we’ll take a look at the mail function. It’s pretty simple.

bool mail($to, $subject, $content, $headers)

mail() returns a boolean value – true for success, false for failure.

The first three parameters are pretty simple. $to is the sending e-mail address (your user). $subject is the subject line of your message (one line – no linebreaks!). $content is a string containing the text of the message.

$headers is optional. It can be used to add additional headers – such as cc: or bcc: lines. You can also use the $headers to add a “From:” – otherwise the standard sending e-mail addressing in the php.ini file is used.

Building the Form

Before we get to the script processing, let’s build a quick HTML form to get some user input.

The form should give us the sender’s e-mail address and name along with the recipient’s e-mail address and name. For now, we’ll hard-code the subject and message, although this could be gathered in the form as well.

<form method="post" action="share.php">
  <input type="text" name="sendname" id="sendname" /><br />
  <input type="text" name="sendaddress" id="sendaddress" /><br />
  <input type="text" name="recname" id="recname" /><br />
  <input type="text" name="recaddress" id="recaddress" /><br />
  <input type="submit" value="Send Message" />
</form>

That should gather the four pieces of input for us.

Processing the Input and Sending the Message

Now we can add build a quick php snippet to process the form input, send it to the mail() function, and let the user know if the mail was sent or not. For the sake of brevity, I won’t include a lot of error checking and validation – but you should if you’re implementing this for real.

$sendName = $_POST['sendname'];
$sendAddress = $_POST['sendaddress'];
$recName = $_POST['recname'];
$recAddress = $_POST['recaddress'];
 
//  Get the URL of the page we're on
$pageURL = 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
 
//  Build the message
$content = "Hey $recName,
 
I found this <a href='$pageURL'>cool article</a> on Web Cash.  Why don't you read it and tell me what you think.
 
Later,
- $sendName";
 
$to = $recAddress;
$subject = "Cool Article on Web Cash - Check It Out!";
$headers = "From: $sendAddress";
 
if ( mail($to, $subject, $content, $headers) ) {
   echo "Mail was sent successfully!";
}  else {
   echo "There was an error.  Doh!";
}

And that’s about all there is to it…

Jazzing It Up

Once you understand how the mail() function works, you can improve the form a lot.

You could allow the user to input their own message, using a textarea. You could also allow them to enter a custom subject in a text field.

You could allow multiple recipients with extra text fields. To do this, separate each e-mail address with a , and a space – like “joe@bob.com, bob@joe.com” – in the $to variable.

A few words of caution, though.

First, you’ll often run into trouble using the mail() function on a local server. If you do, I’d suggest testing your script on a remote server before you pull your hair out for no reason.

Second, beware of spam. This is a good exercise to go through to understand the mail() function, but you should be aware that people do use forms to spam people. You may want to find a captcha module and use that to verify your users are real people – or you could inadvertently be spamming the world with email about your articles.

I started a (now defunct) website last year, powered by WordPress. It never got too popular, and in the beginning I was excited every time I got a “New Comment” or “New Trackback” e-mail. Then I realized they were mostly all spam.

A few minutes ago, I checked my e-mail and had a spam comment in my inbox. I thought, “Ahh, here comes the spam.”

When I logged into the dashboard, I spammed the comment and was about to move away. Then I happened to look at the dashboard again – and I remembered that I had set up Akismet this time around.

I just added the widget to the left sidebar because I was so impressed. Akismet apparently blocked 84 spam comments – and this was the first one that got through. I’d say that’s pretty impressive.

If you’re running a WordPress blog, or something else that uses comments and can utilize an Akismet plug-in, do so. There’s nothing more frustrating than wading through spam comments and trackbacks all day long.

Akismet is apparently pretty effective at cutting them down. A few of them might sift through, but you can never get rid of all the spam. So be happy if you can eliminate 84/85.

You can download the Akismet plugin for WordPress, but all new builds come with Akismet pre-installed. All you have to do is fill in the Akismet API number – which you can get for free with a WordPress account.

Happy spam-free comment logs.