Think of blog spam as cockroaches

neville

I’m very glad that I implemented comment and trackback moderation on this blog (and on my other blogs).

Today, this blog plus my other one and my two experimental ones collectively get hit with an average of 8-12 spam comments or trackbacks a day. Because of moderation, they don’t appear on any blog – I zap ’em before they can see daylight.

It’s getting trickier, though, to spot the obvious spam from among genuine comments or trackbacks as more often than not, the content is written to seem very relevant to what you post. It’s not only links to porn, pills and gambling sites – you have to study them much more closely which adds to the time you have to spend manually weeding out the crap.

But I’m not yet close to the terminal action Pete Shinbach has taken with his blog – as a result of spam, he’s closed down and no longer writes his blog. Pete, I hope you find a way to come back online.

Charles Arthur has a good way to think about this dross, in a comment he left to an earlier post I wrote about the relentlessness of blog spam:

[…] Think of it as being like an infestation of something – fleas, cockroaches, whatever you like – and of your blog as a living thing it’s trying to infest. It’ll go for the unregarded corners.

So I’ll continue being vigilant with my can of virtual Raid and hope that someone, somewhere out there can develop a truly effective means of preventing such spam ever getting to your blog.

4 thoughts on “Think of blog spam as cockroaches”

  1. The day the comments stopped

    Well, apparently it was a busy weekend for comment spam. We got hit too–for the first time. So commentators will have more restrictions, as I warned. First, we’ll see how “word verification” works.

  2. I’m not sure what spam system Ben Hamilton implemented for me, but I get all my spam blocked. There are various algorithms the software uses to check for potential spam, it then quarantines the post and lets me know via email of its existence, giving me the option in that same email of deleting or approving.
    More power to WordPress, it would seem! {smile}

  3. I have two systems in effect to battle comment and trackback spamming on my blog.
    1. b2evolution has a great anti-spam system that downloads updates from a central list and blocks any comments and trackbacks with links (i.e. not words alone) that are banned.
    2. I analyzed the logfiles on my server and found what kind of user-agents the spammers use, and consequently blocked them with rules in a .htaccess-file. This and the fact that I’ve blocked IP-addresses and IP-ranges that known notorious spammers use, makes the total amount of trackback spam zero.
    A couple of hundred requests a day are being blocked and referrer spammers are being sent back to where they say they’re from.
    My point is that there ARE simple solutions to blocking spam.

Comments are closed.