Spamhuntress

I needed a new guestbook a few months ago, for a website I created. With my background, I of course knew how bad it could get, so I wanted to reduce the amount of moderating I needed to do. First I chose a guestbook that was created by someone who understood spam. He claimed it would kill spam effectively before it could even be posted.

Yeah, I’ve noticed an AOL member trying several times before her post got through…

But I also figured that if the guestbook couldn’t be found in Google, it wouldn’t be spammed. So I used robots.txt and even put nofollow on links to it. Problem was, I had forgotten about one or two, that didn’t have nofollow on them. Consequently, the link shows up in Google, without a blurb or cache. But it’s still named “guestbook”.

So I get the occasional spammy comment.

I have an idea for Googlebot (Matt, are you listening?):

If the site the document is on has ONLY nofollow links to it, you should not count links coming from OUTSIDE the same domain as an OK to display the link in Google. If the site ITSELF means for it to stay outside of Google, that should count as a NO! We can NOT police every link from outside. Granted, this time I was the one who made the error (put a link on a forum and on another site I owned. Both errors have been fixed now), but I’m sure you can see the potential for mischief here?

Or rather, you may not know if you only read this blog.
1. I’m a singer and songwriter.
2. I used to do photography professionally for a while.
3. I just helped out with the filming of a music video, doing whatever needed doing, including being standin for lighting!
4. I’m a recent DDR convert. I love my dance mat!
5. I like watching Sci-Fi.

I got tagged by someone I’d never heard of - G-man. It’s apparently something they call a meme.

So, how about I tag a few? Matt Cutts, Joe (come on man, you know you need a new post on that thing),  Incredibill, Dirk and Richi

Someone posted this on a forum I own:

Hi everyone, I am new on your forum www.nameofsite.com, I’ve been reading it for a while, and decided to try my luck asking a few questions
Who can tell me more in detail about the “name of subforum”. Please Mail Me..!!
Best Regards..!!

To me that sounds like a spammer. Either an attempt to get a specific wording on to a forum, and then spam a forum that accepts the post like crazy. Or an attempt to harvest e-mail addresses?

The username was MelliFobian.

I found this thread in my referrers: Botmaster software discussion at Theadminzone.

I’m still a bit snowed under with work. Hopefully I’ll get time to do some investigation soon.

I just found a spam post in my moderation queue that made me smile. The text was:

Why so much spam in your guestbook???

Which normally would be very relevant in a guestbook… But not where they stuck that thing…

Just totally precious. Read what this forum administrator did to a spammer. Said spammer seemed to believe in recycling of passwords…

Ownage time

For the record: I’ve never done anything like that. Not into “ownage”.

Thanks to evariste for the tip