Sometime between going to bed last night and waking up this morning, I got 497 spam posts on this blog. After scanning through them to verify that no valid posts are awaiting approval, I deleted them, to find #498 had appeared during that time. Posts don’t get published until I approve them, so readers don’t have to deal with junk, but what a hassle! It’s been this bad for the past couple of weeks. I’ll see about taking measures to protect against them.
How is it profitable? I understand people clicking on certain links, such as drugs and mortgages, but what benefit is it to link to the official website of a major theatrical release? Or Google’s gmail subdomains? As Seth Godin recently said, “It’s the enemy of anything open.”
Update: #499 was waiting for me as I was writing this post.
Another update: I just installed something. Hopefully it works well, and hopefully legitimate posters don’t get blocked. If so, my email address is available at the bottom of the page, so please feel free to let me know if your posts can’t make it through.
11 replies on “498 Spam Posts”
I had to install Spam Karma 2 on my WordPress blog on my personal site for this same crud. Really ticks me off… of course, the more spam you’re getting, the higher you might be on the search engine lists… or not.
I’ve seen a lot of people having this problem spring up blogging about it in just the past week or two…. hasn’t hit me yet but that’s because nobody visits my blog (not even spam-bots).
Here’s hopin’ your anti-spam measures work out for ye. Mebbe our types could make more money coding homicidal anti-spam-bot bots. Could be fun I suppose.
Charles: Yeah, I just installed bad-behavior and I might install Spam Karma 2 to help. Since installing BB, I have received about 14 pieces of spam. I don’t know if it is working.
Tim: I am just surprised that it is hitting me so hard all of a sudden. I was getting about 100 per day or so, and it was manageable. Now it takes me five minutes to go through all of the spam to see if there is a legit comment. Those minutes add up quickly!
It’s working.
Michael: I figured it probably was and that five minutes wasn’t really a good way to determine if it was or not. So far I haven’t seen anything since, and I imagine by tomorrow morning I won’t see much either. B-) Thanks!
woah, first gameproducer.net, now you? whats up with this?
Miguel: Spam is just becoming a much bigger nuisance, I’m afraid.
I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with people clicking through, and everything to do with artificially inflating their search rating.
Matt: But only if you own the website, right? Presumably Google or major movie studios aren’t actually using spam as a form of advertising, so why would someone else do it?
Most blog software these days (including wordpress) use the ‘nofollow’ attribute on hrefs. Most search engines ignore these links for rank purposes.
btw.. gbgames.com/blog is PR5 (google page rank 5) if you didn’t know. Congrats. That is very impressive for a personal blog.