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Blog Spam

17:43 Mon 18 Dec 2006. Updated: 06:13 19 Dec 2006
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I’ve been getting more and more of it. Eventually I might have to resort to a captcha system, or to WP Hashcash. For the moment, though, all new commenters have to be verified by me before their posts show.

One of the reasons I seem to be getting more spam is because I’ve moved almost everything from tadhgohiggins.com to this site, and that has some articles on it that have been there for years and years. I suspect that bots have been trying to post comments to them for quite a while.

For the moment, I’m blocking the IP of every spam comment that comes in. This isn’t going to work as a long-term solution, since there are just too many spambots out there, but it does seem to slow them down.

Some of it is rather weird, like one I got earlier that didn’t appear to advertise anything and had text about “gorlum” and a ring. The most disturbing thing so far, though, is that when I was looking through some of my server logs I noticed that a bot of some kind was requesting a whole pile of results from my tag index—including a bunch of topics that I am interested in but have not blogged about, including three games that I play but that do not show up, and have not ever shown up, in my tags…

In any case, it’s very, very annoying, although in some ways I can understand it better than email spam. Blog spam is done to increase page rankings in search engines, so it’s really aimed at fooling Google, MSN, etc. When that works, it’s understandable. But email spam is supposed to fool people, and apparently does so well enough to remain profitable. That there are people who are fooled by the kind of messages I see from spammers (I’m not even including phishing here) is both sad and scary.

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2 Responses to “Blog Spam”

  1. kevintel Says:

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    I get hundreds of spam comments every day – the two plugins I use are Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behaviour; between the two of them, they stop everything. Once in a while I have to moderate a genuine comment from Garret (oddly, his comments often fit the profile of spam comments) but by and large the two are spot on. Bad Behaviour is specifically designed to shut down bot comments, and does so almost completely silently. I thoroughly recommend it.

  2. seo Says:

    Blog spam can be easily prevented by spam karma 2.Simple.

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