Comment spam
Dec 14th, 2008 by Mike
Yesterday I went through the database and cleared out tens of thousands of spam comments. I have also updated .htaccess to deny access to those IP addresses that generate the most comment spam. Unfortunately blocking IP addresses (ranges of IP addresses or even entire countries) in .htaccess is not a foolproof way of eliminating comment spam.
If you blog on Blat I expect you to maintain the comments you receive. If you don’t maintain your comments, I will assume that you have abandoned your blog, and I will delete it.
Please make sure that you don’t approve any spam comments. Approved spam comments only attract more spam comments. An approved spam comment is like a fresh pile of dog poo to a fly!
Please make sure that you don’t approve comments that contain the word ekibastos. I’m not 100% sure about this, but the word ekibastos seems to be a flag for comment spammers. i.e. If your blog displays a comment containing the word ekibastos, other comment spammers see it as an invitation to come and drop their unwanted crap into your comments.
I want people to leave comments even if it is only to have a link back to their website. If it is a bla-bla comment, I agree, delete it. But if it is ‘Nice post’ only (which is probably a comment to build links), I will not delete it. Unless I have 3 comments for the same post with ‘Nice post’. I will delete all.
I leave comments to build links as well, but I also try to participate in the debate and make a contribution.
I guess there is a fine line between leaving a comment to participate, build links and spam. At the end of the day you still have the choice to delete it or not.
Colin there is nothing wrong with leaving comments to build links. The type of spam I’m talking about here is hundreds, even thousands, of comments left on a single blog for the typical online pharmaceutical junk (Tramadol, Viagra, etc.) and comments containing links that link back to a variety of porn sites.
Watch out for scammers trying to get instant rankings, also hiding relevant comments about their “company”. Typically it will be an innocent comment like “I never knew that” or other seemingly innocent tough sometimes slightly puzzling remakrk, and the mandatory URL off course. Job scammers (money mule scams) are big into this.
Any innocent party looking up the “company” on Google or like will find hundreds of hits so it looks good, yet somewhere hidden in between you find links to anti-fraud forums.
I’m having trouble with spammers on my blog today. Today alone I’ve received over 80 spam comments. I’ve got the anti spam plug in activated, however, it doesn’t seem to be “catching” the spammers.
You should activate the Akismet plug-in for your blog.