Your Life Just Got Miserable Again
Over the last several weeks I’ve noticed a sudden and large increase in email and comment-spam, here in the blog and at the site. Just about one year ago there was a worldwide drop in spam when the FTC shut-down McColo (spammers haven) and it seemed for a while that the world was nearly spam-free. But, as confirmed by Google yesterday, ‘da spam is back – have you noticed?
There are a few things you can do to deal with the spamslaught.
- Bend over, grin, and take it
- use a few simple tools & techniques to fight/block it
Both at the site and here in the blog we use BadBehavior which blocks the vast majority of auto-spam bots. I also have Akismet on the blog which catches much of the ‘manual’ spam. Finally, we have a list of over 1,000,000 spammer’s servers/IP’s that are blocked at the firewall. If you’re on a shared host and/or don’t have your own firewall, you can accomplish almost the same thing by using something like the Troll module (for Drupal). We were also using Mollom at the site for a while, but between BadBehavior and our IP block-list, we decided Mollom was just getting in the way. We removed it a few weeks ago and saw no detectable increase in spam posts.
How to tell if that comment was real or spam:
I thought that everyone realized this, but after talking to a blogger-friend that had no idea that all those new comments on his blog were actually just spam-posts for a free link, I figure I should share it.
Have you gotten those comments in your blog that go like this: “nice blog, keep up the good work“, or “I never thought of it this way, you explained it very well” ? Well, I hate to break it to you, but those aren’t admirers – dem’s spammers. Here is a quick test I use to determine if the post is real, or just a spammer trying to take advantage of my DoFollow:
The spammers post these same comments on a million different blogs, so ask yourself “would this comment make as much sense on any other post?” – if the answer is YES, then it’s probably a generic spam post; If the URL provided by the person making the post also happens to go to some “payday loans” or “viagra” site, then it’s definitely spam. So basically, if the comment does not add any value to that specific post, or if it is so generic it could be applied to any post, it’s probably spam.
Of course, some bloggers/webmasters don’t care about the spam and allow it to go unchecked. But, I do all i can to protect my site members and blog readers from spam, and I’m proud to say that we’re 99.9% spam free.
What tools methods do you use to fight comment-spam, or do you just not care?
I have been having the same problem with my blogs (hosted on Blogspot)… do you know if the software works on those as well?
Biztone said:
Blogspot/blogger used to have the option to add a captcha, which would help reduce your spammy comments.. a little.. As far as i know, you can’t add any good third party scripts like BadBehavior to a Blogger blog..
Good incentive to get one of those $5/month webservers, buy a domain, and run your own WordPress!
I’ve just realized that these kind of comments were spam when I received the same comment in two different posts, now everything that Akismet detects as spam I trust, so when the comments go to the spam section of Akismet, too bad, because I just hit “Delete all spam”.
There are even ones in russian.. lol
I needs to activate me that Askimet. So tired of spam. And tired of manually inputting the Blacklisted IPs.
Spammers, get thee some Real Jobs,please.
Jannie Funster said:
Sadly, a good spammer probably earns more money than you and me combined.. I think that’s part of the problem..