It’s been quite some time since I had a decent rant on this blog, and I didn’t sleep well last night, and I am feeling a tiny bit grumpy, so pretty much anything will set me off on a rant. I figure I may as well get it off my chest now, then I can get down to work.
Comment spammers, you guys really suck.
I enjoy having a blog. I don’t try to support it with ads. It’s a flat out expense: my $8 or $10 a month buys my hosting, and I can run WordPress and I’m really quite happy. To date, I’ve made 3234 posts (this will be 3235) and have approved 1,588 comments in the six years or so its been going on. For everyone who has found anything of genuine interest here, I thank you for checking it out, and occasionallly leaving your genuine comments.
But here’s my reality: since October, 2006 (the earliest date I have good statistics for) my blog, the spam filter Akismet that WordPress ships with has caught 202,756 spam comments. In some sense, these aren’t the worst problem, since they are automatically caught and routed directly to the bit bucket. Nobody ever sees these posts. They don’t generate even a single click through. But the ratio of legitimate comments to fake comments is about 200:1 or so. That means that the vast majority of the actual cost in terms of bandwidth that I see is likely to go to these comment spammers. If we could eliminate spammers, there would be lots more, lots cheaper bandwidth available for us all.
But another kind of comment spam is currently sneaking past my filters occasionally. If you have no links inside your post, but merely use the ability to specify a URL with your ID, it will often make it through my spam filter and get posted. Many of these “comments” contain empty platitudes like “Wow, this is a great post, I’m bookmarking your site for later.” Who are they kidding? It’s annoying to have to read this kind of banal crap, whose only purpose is to send you to some overseas pharmacy where you can get drugs for that “special part of the male anatomy”.
Bleh! Comment spammers are going to a huge amount of effort to annoy us all. Can’t we all just rally with pitchforks and make the world a better place?
I now return you to your regularly scheduled morning.
Mark,
I use blogspot.com for my blog and it has a “captcha” requirement on comments – In general, I don’t like captchas but with it, I get ZERO spam comments.
I think wordpress has a “captcha plugin”, as per Google.
Eldon – WA0UWH
Hi,
Most of the blog/forum spam appears to be automated. Spammers are seeking to increase their site ranking by generating inbound links into yet another spam site/blog (typically called splogs). WordPress has a feature already enabled (nofollow) to tell search engines to not follow/count that inbound link (see html code) I think those spammers count on humans also clicking on the name/url.
I read your blog via Google Reader RSS (have subscribed both to the posts and comments and do see the spam comments in the comments RSS feed – doesn’t appear that Google Reader refreshes feeds once they have been downloaded).
Thank you for taking the time to post information.
Gus