Blog spam is way up
Blog spam is way up compared to before.
I hadn’t enabled any of the Wordpress filters, just to see what I’d get. But by now it’s to the point where I need more filters in order to cut down on what I am wade through every day, looking for legitimate comments.
And if an anti-spam blog gets spammed that much, I can only imagine how bad it is out there for really busy sites!
May 17th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Hi Ann,
For the sites I am webmaster of, the attempts at SEO spam has risen dramatically … I estimate 1000% from last month. My filters (hand-rolled) are still missing about 1-2% of it (which is a lot, making a mess of the guestbooks), and I’m constantly scrambling to add more conditions to try and capture it all.
And my rejection logs are each > 1 Meg for the month of May so far. I wish these spammers would at least run a second bot to see if their attempts were successful. They could save themselves some bandwidth by not constantly assaulting the spam-resistant sites!
May 17th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Your comment suggests that because your blog is about anti-spam it *should* get spammed less, well this is idiotic. Everything in blackhat SEO is automated in BULK and your efforts are futile, a script doesn’t care what your blog is about as long as it can whack a few URIs on it!
May 17th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
To Esrun,
True, the scripts won’t care. But my point is that the spammers are stupid. They should at least run some sort of query against the database. Weed out any domain with “spam” in it, for instance.
May 17th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
I have moderated comments on my blog which means I’ve essentially converted blog comment spam into an email spam. I do look at those comment spams carefully and those spammers get higher priority over any other anti-splog activities I do. I figured they’ve put extra efforts to get my attention so mind as well give them the attention they seek.
May 18th, 2006 at 2:13 am
But all blog owners whine about spam… the amount of blogs you would be removing from your list wouldn’t be worth it since you do not expect spam sites to live long anyway, thats why they build in bulk.
May 18th, 2006 at 4:41 am
Argh Splog Fighter you post here do you. Someone was talking about you the other day, although your attempts are again rather futile since you cannot keep up with the number of blackhats. You’re more of an annoyance.
May 19th, 2006 at 1:56 am
A spammer tried to leave a comment with 656 gambling links on my blog today. Is this a record for stupidity?
May 19th, 2006 at 2:04 am
To Michael,
And you COUNTED them? Please tell me you had some automatic tool to do that…
May 19th, 2006 at 3:24 am
The spammer made it easy for me! All the links pointed to the same gambling site.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
Got a question - do I really lose anything if I throw away all entries in my guestbook which contain HTML tags. I can put up a nice message telling the human user that he or she included HTML tags and should take them out otherwise the entry won’t go in. And I could include a line that says if they really need the tags they should send me email and I will put them in.
What do you guys think?
June 20th, 2006 at 3:19 am
@starWolf: do You have so sophisticated guests and they really need to put HTML in?
Look around here - do you see many HTML code in replies? On ocasion you find a link here.
October 1st, 2006 at 7:28 am
The best way to stop spam would be to spend some time in moderating the comments persoanlly rather than relying on any captchas. You can go to the other extreme of not allowing anyone to comment - but then the whole essence of sharing information is lost. At least Yahoo and MSN rewards the commentators with relevant backlinks, so that is a reward which many spammers like to go for.
October 1st, 2006 at 7:39 am
To Tom:
I moderate comments personally, because I want to see what’s out there. If I hadn’t been running an anti-spam blog, I would have had anti-spam measures to the hilt. Even as it is, I have to limit some spam to make moderating feasible at all.
So your suggestion is crap for normal people. There is so much spam we need to limit it. Manual moderation just takes too much time.
January 7th, 2007 at 5:16 am
Viewing every comment (though time consuming) can be the best thing to stop spam postings.