Dear Spammers
Dear comment spammers,
I really wish you would give up and go away. For the most part I don't even see you, but for every 500 of you, one of your comments slips past my multi-faceted spam BARRICADE and requires me to (maybe once a month) clear out the handful of comments sitting in my spam queue.
The comments that make it through look like they're actually submitted by a human, rather than an automated bot, so in a way it's kind of funny. For your spam to get through, you must exert more time than it take me to eradicate your efforts.
Since starting this blog, Akismet has blocked 11,897 spam comments. About a year ago (maybe a little longer than that), I added another layer of protection which has blocked 9,461 spam comments. That's more than 8 times the number of legitimate comments posted.
Fortunately, the current setup works nicely and removes the majority of the problem automatically. But who knows if this will always be the case? Will the spammers come out on top?
Anyway… come on guys, please find somewhere else to submit your spam?
Thanks
Tags: blog spam
Tom said,
I guess that's the advantage of having my blog on a site that requires registration in order to message or comment. I'm not a fan of having to fill in a CAPTCHA and waiting for my comments to be approved by the moderator, bug if I can't register on a site and that's the only option, I suffer gladly.
January 10, 2011 @ 2:44 pm
sparx said,
I try to limit the inconvenience.
No captcha, no account creation. Moderation only occurs for new users.
And links are "nofollow" for people that don't comment often, so even if something DOES get through, it's pretty much useless for what the spammer was trying to accomplish.
And I post about stupid stuff, so the blog doesn't become too big of a target. 😛
January 10, 2011 @ 2:50 pm
spudart said,
My comment moderation system pretty much sucks. Unlikelymoose and I are on an old platform called pMachine that stopped development five or so years ago. I've been meaning to port our blogs over to a better platform, like Drupal. But I need to figure out the database mappings for all the comment subscriptions in the system. it sounds kinda simple, but there's some goofy cross-references that throw me off every time i look at it.
January 10, 2011 @ 2:57 pm
sparx said,
Oh yeah! You should email me a list of the table fields. I'm good at that stuff.
January 10, 2011 @ 3:56 pm
unlikelymoose said,
About five years ago, I wrote a series of w-r-i-s-t w-a-t-c-h reviews. That was a big mistake. Apparently there's a gigantic spam community for that stuff.
January 18, 2011 @ 1:15 pm
sparx said,
A couple years ago I actually made one of my ebay sites for wristwatches. I forgot about it until last month I actually referred sales for a few watches and was like "…where did those come from?"
I didn't put much time into it, which the sub-title of "Wrist Watches For Sale" makes a bit obvious. (It's not spam if it's my own site! HA!)
January 21, 2011 @ 8:06 am