Spam Again …
October 31, 2008 by Lillie
photo credit: Gauravonomics
For some strange reason, I had a few spam-free days when I moved my blog from a subdirectory to the main directory of my Web site. In the previous two years, Akismet had caught 97,000+ spam comments. Then for a day or two i had zero spam comments!
Then the spam started coming again—a trickle, a stream, a river, a flood. Now, a month later, Akismet has caught 10,000+ spam comments. 10,000 in one month! During the same time, I’ve had about 500 legitimate comments—20 spam comments for every real comment.
The bulk of the spam can be classified as porn, pills, and plagiarism …
Porn: Ads about perverted sex are wasted on a person who openly expresses her Christian faith and values on the blog.
Pills: If the pill purveyors only knew of the adverse reactions I’ve had from prescription medicine they’re trying to sell without prescriptions, they would know there’s nothing for them here.
Plagiarism: Perhaps the thing that amazes me the most are those spammers who plagiarize earlier comments—or even my post! At first, these were hard to catch because they showed up on old posts with lots of comments. But now I’m getting comments that repeat a sentence from my post within minutes of posting.
Thank heavens for Akismet. I’ve been checking comments in spam to look for legitimate comments. A few of my regular commenters end up in spam—I don’t know why, but I try to catch them. But skimming through hundreds of spam comments each day is time-consuming and very unpleasant, and I may stop doing it. If your comment doesn’t appear, e-mail me and I’ll look for it. Otherwise, I may miss it.
Can anyone explain to me why in the world spammers spam?
They’re doing it for the backlinks. But they use automated software or something. I don’t really know how they do it, but it’s annoying.
Is it ever annoying! I remember seeing one time about an e-mail spammer who was a gazillionaire. He just throws out enough stuff that some of it sticks—enough of it to make him fabulously wealthy, in fact. But I wonder how someone like that can look themselves in the mirror or sleep at night.
Spammers are so annoying. I spend more of my time erasing spam from my email then I do actually reading emails from my friends. What’s even more sad is that the people spamming are making good money from what they do. That means people are actually buying the crap that they are selling. Sad world we live in! -M
Sad world we live in, indeed, when spammers are making good money.
I am glad that I do not receive these kind of spammy comments. I think I would quit blogging because I don’t want to enable these kind of sites.
Money Bush´s last blog post..ScratchBack Links: Tip Jar for Blogs
It looks like your blog is new. The longer your blog is around, the more spam you will get—especially since you are a DoFollow blog. I like giving my commenters links, but that increases spam exponentially. I got very little spam when I first started blogging, but 2 1/2 years later and after making my blog DoFollor, I get more and more. Since I wrote this post yesterday, I’ve got 1,000+ more spam comments.
Lillie, I have three screen names that are so loaded with Spam that I no longer use them. I periodically change screen names until the spammers catch up with me. So I’ve learned to never sign up for anything online because they must sell your screen name to all the spammers.
JeanHenry,
In my early days of being online, I made the mistake of clicking unsubscribe on spam, naively thinking that would keep that spammer from sending more spam. Instead, it confirmed that my address was legitimate and therefore brought a higher price to sell to more spammers. E-mail spam is not nearly as bad for me as it used to be because my Web host has pretty stringent filters. If comment spam continues to worse, I may just set Akismet to delete all spam.
Well, Lillie. Sometimes, the Akimset can be really sensitive and messed up. Just keep your eyes on the comments and you will differential which of the comments are spams or not…
PS: Hopefully, my comments isn’t a spam for you here, Lillie
wilson´s last blog post..Your Home Should Be a Comfortable Living Place!
Wilson,
Your comments have never ended up in spam—there are only two commenters that happens to. Akismet really does an excellent job. Very seldom does it let anything slip through and very seldom does it mark something as spam that isn’t.
Spammers would appear to be of a particular species who have only a few brain cells, if any!
On one of my blogs, I’ve gone and caught, or rather Askimet has, nearly 3,000 of the little critters.
All we do is keep on deleting them cause as eggs is eggs, they’re never going to stop.
Great blog by the way, and worth protecting!
JB,
Unfortunately you are right—the spammers will never stop. We have to keep being vigilant … and thankful for Akismet!
It is crazy to how much spam you can receive in one day. I own several blogs and I spend more time filtering through all the spam related junk trying to find the real comments. And yes thank god for Akismet but I still do get spam that I have to filter through.
The sad thing is that all the spam will never go away like stated above and they will find a way around the Akismet in the near future and something else will have to fill in for it. It will be never ending and will continue to waste our time trying to filter through it all.
Webkinz´s last blog post..Webkinz World: The kids online Kindgom
Webkinz,
You’re right—the spammers are usually one step ahead of the good guys. And when the good guys get ahead, the spammers catch up and pass them quickly.
I just started a bog and haven’t had many comments yet. I have gone back in and turned on Askimet after reading what you have said here. I can’t imagine trying to go through 1000′s of messages to weed out the good stuff!
Herb´s last blog post..Chinese Herbal Cures
Herb,
You’re wise to prepare for future spam. It takes a while for the spammers to discover a new blog, but once they find you, watch out. I wrote this post two days ago, and my spam comment has gone from 10,000+ to 14,000+ since then.
Consider carefully whether or not to make your blog DoFollow. I intend to keep my blog DoFollow—I know some of my regular readers and commenters originally found me because they were looking for DoFollow blogs to comment on to build links to their own blogs. I love having a diverse readership. However, you are targeting a niche market and may be more interested in attracting only people interested in your topic. DoFollow may be more of a detriment because it will bring you lots more spam as well as lots more worthwhile comments. You have to decide what’s best for you.
I have observed clearly that spamming is there in almost all the small Forums & blogs. But can be removed provided we detect those spammy comments so that such blatant online advertising need to be eliminated gradually.
My friend maintains 4 blogs & he spends considerable amount of time every day to remove spammy comments on his blogs.
Thanks & Regards,
Krishna
Yikes! Dealing with this much spam on 4 blog might be more than I could handle.
Terrible way of making money. If you ask kids what they want to be when they grow up, imagine in the future someone saying “I want to make money so I´m gonna be a spammer” What is happening to this crazy world?
That’s a sad thought … but a likely situation, unfortunately.
I do get some pretty crazy spam as well. Its not people usually its a program or a task set up on the computer.
One thing I’ve figured out—a little slow on the uptake, I guess—is that the spam in Akismet is separated into comments and trackbacks. There are many times more trackbacks than comments. All I do now is review the comments and delete the trackbacks wholesale. That takes less time as well as keeping from me seeing some of the vile stuff that comes in, but I can still catch legitimate comments that get sent to spam in error.
They spam the world for two possible reasons.
1. They are stupid themselves.
2. They assume that all webmasters are stupid.
I think it is better if you are leaving an option to approve some comments which go in spam. Your regular user’s comments are going in spam because they are commenting on too many do follow blogs with specific keywords and site to enjoy link juice.
willb,
It’s easier now to look for legitimate comments in spam now that it’s finally dawned on me that I only need to look in comments and not trackbacks in Akismet.
I also delete the trackbacks. I also delete the 1 or 2 word comments like “nice!” or “thanks!” or “great post”.
I haven’t had a flood of spam comments, it’s enough to get annoying.
Andy,
Sounds like we have similar spam policies. It’s good to establish those policies before spam becomes a flood—and hope it never does!
this is because there are lot of cheap “Comment services” out there. I saw in a forum 500 comment posting for just $10. Now what they do? Must not human manual entry instead software based entries.
az,
Not only are the spammers obnoxious, but the spammer-enablers aka comment services are even worse!
Wow .. BRIC sure is the highest spam of all .. I wonder why is that could happen?? Spam makes nothing you know, because a lot of people don’t care about spam anymore, people just let spam pass through ..
Richard,
Spam totally bumfuzzles me. Why people do it when everyone hates it …