Thursday, December 15, 2011

Is It Just Me?

Or has there recently been a crapton increase in spam comments?

Now, I don't get a ton of comments (there's always room for more!), but I'd really hate to go to having to approve each comment before it can be posted. While I'm pretty connected, I want folks to be able to comment immediately and not have to wait for the comments to show up. Recently, like the past week or so, there's been a crapload of "buy cialis" and "Indian pharmacy" and the like showing up - and I delete them as soon as I get the notification.

This brings up two questions: 1. Short of going to approving comments, is there any way to tighten up the comment requirements to avoid this? and 2. Who the bloody hell actually clicks these damn links? If we can find the morons that actually encourage this bullshit, we can start arranging heavy sack beatings...

Spam: Crappy canned meat, even worse in my inbox.

That is all.

14 comments:

Alan said...

Move your blog to a platform that supports Akismet.

Borepatch said...

I haven't seen it, and both traffic and (legitimate) comments are up. But maybe that's just me.

ASM826 said...

My exploration of this problem lead me to start moderating comments. Last I looked into it, Blogspot does not have any mechanism to designate senders or keywords as spam.

Irish said...

I only get a handfull of spam but it is segregated for me to look at.

I use gmail as my email for theferalirishman.

TheMinuteman said...

What Alan said. My traffic is growing but for a while when I didn't update the blog often I did get someone who just started blasting spam at my site.

Initially I used an Akismet plugin that did a fantastic job. How fantastic, I was seeing 0 spam that needed my approval. Even when I made the change to Disqus the number I was seeing was still 0 and Disqus appears to support blogger as a platform.

George said...

One more in favor of Askimet.

Jake (formerly Riposte3) said...

I've seen a lot more spam comments over the last month or two, but Wordpress's filter has caught nearly all of it as far as I can tell.

Jay G said...

Moving the blog is a lot more work that I want to do right now, but thanks for the idea.

I just kicked it over to moderate comments over 2 weeks old - it seems that the vast majority of the spam goes on older posts, that might help things.

ASM826, I was looking for that as well - keywords - it's pretty surprising they don't let you filter that out...

Thanks everyone. Looks like it's just me...

Dragon said...

Hey...I *like* that canned meat. The comment-type spam, not so much. Askimet does a great job on my blog.

Funny, ain't it, that I like Spam, but can't stand Weer'ds favorite, Scrapple (at least if I recall correctly, he likes Scrapple, which is the meat that couldn't make the cut to be put into Spam...)

Peter said...

Jay, I'd change your settings so that all posts older than a certain period are automatically set for comment moderation. On my blog, I display five days' posts per screen; so I allow free commenting on those posts. Anything older than 5 days is comment-moderated - and yes, I do get a fair number of spam comments on those.

If you use Sitemeter or a similar service, you can sometimes catch the spammers in action. I've seen a recent comment, switched to Sitemeter, found the transaction that posted the comment, and checked its details. Most of them seem to come from India, where I understand there are entire companies who'll search on keywords you designate and leave spam comments on any blog posts that are identified in that way, hoping to attract click-throughs from those searching for the same subject.

I think the only solution might be to reinstitute the auto-da-fe in honor of Torquemada, with spammers as the guests of (dis)honor . . .

Weer'd Beard said...

when THAT many people seem concerned about the size of your man-meat, maybe you should think about listening!

Comrade Misfit said...

You've probably have a lot more readers than I do, but here's what I've found out:

If you go to the comments page on Blogger, you can see a list of all of the comments made on your blog. Then you can mark them as "spam". It seems to me that whatever algorithm Blogger uses to tag spam seems to improve over time. And if the spammers' comments never appear, they eventually go away.

The other thing is to set a window for when people can leave comments unmoderated. That seems to help, as well.

Pakkinpoppa said...

I second the heavy sack beating recommendation for spammers, I believe that identity thieves should also be subject to that punishment as well.

It'd cut down on both problems and be a handy stress relief too!

Anonymous said...

Query: can we use baseball bats during said beatings?

And I'm rather disappointed that no one's posted the Monty Python video yet....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE