Thursday, January 17, 2013

I Hate Spam!

When I began this blog five years ago, I did not moderate comments or anything like that.  I allowed anybody that wanted to post a comment to do so.  If I came across a comment that I felt was spam then I would go ahead and delete it.  It really wasn't much of a problem.

Two years ago, when this blog had a lot more traffic thanks to services such as Adgitize and Entrecard, I finally made the decision to add comment moderation due to an increase in spam comments.  Even at that point in time, it wasn't really that bad, maybe 3 or 4 spam comments over the period of a week.  It was enough for me to give moderation a try.

I never went back to allowing all comments to appear.  At that time, I probably had about 100 visitors each day.  I would get a spam comment maybe once every couple of weeks ago.  Now, my daily visitors are running considerably lower than it was two years ago.  Unfortunately, the spam comments have gotten completely out of control over the last few weeks.

This evening, I came home from work and logged into my blogger control panel and saw that there were six comments needing moderation.  All of them were spam.  I deleted them and then went to the spam folder of my comment dashboard and found another twenty or so comments that my spam filter caught.  All were for the same post that I wrote in 2010 called Peacocks and Other Sights.

That seems to be the modus operandi of these folks.  They find an old post from a couple years ago and then make their comments linking their spam site to it.  Another post that seems to be getting a lot of spam comments is my post It's Bloody Hot in Here from 2011.

So now, due to this heavy barrage of spam comments, I am not going to go back into my control settings once more.  The vast majority of these comments come from "Anonymous" so I am now going to no longer allow Anonymous comments.  If that doesn't cut back on the spam, I may have to go back to having to enter those CAPTCHA word verification puzzles that I hate so much.

Anyway, if nothing else, it gives me another opportunity to post some Monty Python.  This is the only spam that I can tolerate, no offense to the meat product by the same name, which I have never tried so can not give an honest opinion of it.


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4 comments:

  1. I'm also having trouble with Anonymous spam. In the last few weeks I've been getting a dozen a week, starting to become a burden. Like you say, they attach themselves to old blogs. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would like to think that receiving a lot of spam means that I matter to at least some people. Sigh.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I don't know if my first try went through or not. For up popped a notification that my account had been disabled on account of perceived unusual activity when I went to leave my comment. I suppose I should leave more comments here--huh?

    Anyway, my comment was: I would like to think that receiving lots of spam means that I matter to at least some people (or something like that). Sigh.

    ReplyDelete

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