Getting Rid of Comment Spam Friday 2006-02-17
In a great article “New Comment Spammer on the Loose - Pay Attention” Lorelle strikes at comment spammers and gives some advice on how to fight these ever lasting creatures. She tells us the sad story of the new and inventive ways spammers use to sneak through spam filters, such as Aksimet and Spam Karma. One method is to steel content from the blog post and try to give the impression of giving a real comment to it. The method is usually easy to detect, as it results in very strange wording. Another new method is to impersonate some humble blogger seeking advice from this excellent blogger, and Lorelle gives examples of such spam creeping through. Here is one:
hi! I am Theresa, from Spain, and for my school I am doing a research on blogging on the internet. May I show this to my teacher and class on thursday? Thanks, Theresa, 16 years, Barcelona.
Makes your heart bleed, doesn’t it? That is until you find 17 copies on different posts, all linking to pornography in your blog. There’s a dark side to human nature, no doubt.
Lorelle gives you advice on how to catch comment spam and also how to pass through the spam filters with your legitimate comment. She says:
“If you comment on a blog, make your comment look like a comment and not comment spam. Don’t just say “thanks, this helpedâ€. Say something more specific.”
Be enlightened, read it and contemplate!
- Posted in : The Internet, WordPress
- Author : Petit
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Friday 2006-02-17
Something specific like “Petit, I really loved what you wrote about me and my article on catching scum-sucking comment spammers.”
It is so important that blog fans learn how to comment in a way that gets around comment spam filters, but it’s also a struggle as comment spammers are doing the same thing. We just must be vigilant and willing to say sorry to legitimate comments we delete because we were in doubt.
Sucks that we have to do such things, but evil exists and we must stamp it out.
Thanks again for the kind words and the site is looking better all the time. Keep it up!
Friday 2006-02-17
Lorelle: Thanks a bunch for the kind words regarding my layout. It’s cleaner thanks to your eminent comments ( and some hard work in my learning process
The struggle for spam free comment pages seems to be a lot of hard work. It is well known from the email arena and have caused tremendous loss in efficiency there.
As I see it, the Internet and the web is foremost about freedom and community, freedom of speech, freedom of information access and the building of cross border understanding. And with new technology it’s becoming a great vehicle for just that - call it Web 2.0 if you like ;). Automatic linking of relevant information and the individuals behind is just one of the new tools.
But freedom means open gateways for easy access, and open gates always invited the bad and the ugly as well as the good in people - that’s who we are, human.
At the university where I used to work, we had a website for the teacher, the students and anyone interested. It was wide open to the world, as it should be. For easy and effortless contact with the members of staff, we had a contact page with all names and email addresses, directly clickable. Maybe naïve, bu that’s how it should be. It all worked very well for many years, but you all know what happened, I believe.
One day the in-boxes of all staff had some spam, and a few weeks later they were filled with spam. It all came very sudden, and there is no doubt in my mind, some scumbag had sold our addresses, and it didn’t take long before 95% of the everyday batch of mail was dirty tricks, mainly suggesting better sex.
There’s a war going on between freedom of speech and a tidal wave of noise, wherein the speech may drown.