Blog Spammers Hit 4
Blog Spam
I’ve noticed the number of blog spammers have increased significantly in the last 2 months. They use general “good job” or “nice work” comments, then leave their email and commercial weblink. I assume these are spam-bots – automatically doing it.
Moderated Comments
Since all comments are moderated here, I’ll do my best to weed them out if they aren’t related to the posted article. Only on-topic links will remain and generic posts will not be allowed. It isn’t like there are hundreds of spam posts daily. I know this will reduce the number of comments, but that is the price for non-spam comments today. Sorry. If you’re comment is on topic, it will be posted. Basically, any comment that is remotely on topic will be posted. Just those that are commercial or links to unrelated content will not be posted. For example, if the post is about virtualization and you provide a comment with links to an online vitamin store, that will not be posted. OTOH, if links in comments are to other articles on virtualization or even commercial virtualization products, then it will be allowed. The decision of moderators leans towards posting comments when in doubt.
Test Messages
I guess some people don’t want to bother writing a longer message if it won’t be posted. I get that, but a test message is not on topic either and won’t be posted. How does that comment add to the conversation?
Further, I’ve disabled comments for older articles. I don’t recall the actual cutoff day. It is probably 90 or 120 days, so it won’t impact the few, loyal, readers. Those articles do not have any way to enter any comments. If there is a comment field displayed, then your comment will be seen by the moderators.
Hello, Nice Article and other non-related comments were allowed previously, but are not going forward. Sorry. Those do not add to the conversation.
English Only Please
This is an English language blog. While we like worldwide viewers and understand that not everyone reads English, that is simply a limitation of our skills. I have translated some non-English comments previously. None were on-topic to the post. We may attempt to translate comments again, but you can visit translate.google.com just as easily as we can.
No Sign-up Required
We do not require any sign up to post comments. Heck, we don’t really want your email address either. An alias is preferred. If you leave an email address or web address, it will probably be included in the comment and publicly seen. That seems to be the way this software works. Our systems do log IP addresses, just like every other system out there does.
Example Blocks
A few of these spammers have been blocked at the router. Sure they can come from a different subnet, but I bet they won’t.
The financial planning and foreign internet diamond sellers are the funniest. Blocked.
Automatic Moderation
I’ve looked into viable solutions to allow non-moderated comments here and didn’t find one that I was willing to implement.
Here’s a site from 2005 with specific ideas to reduce, if not eliminate internet marketing on blogs. About a year ago, I came across another site where the blogger had placed a static Captcha with an simple arithmetic problem inside the image. The answer was always “42.” He never changed it, Never, yet it prevented 100% of the blog spam. I may introduce that here.
If I were running MT or blogger or some other highly popular blog tool, then I’d have a bigger issue. Since I’m running a little used Ruby blog with few internet users, I’m fairly safe just like Linux and Apple are safe compared to Microsoft.
Today, we are manually moderating comments about once a day.
Comment Edits
Occasionally, comments may be edited by a moderator to remove offensive content. We will say in the post that it was edited. Cuss words will probably be removed or exchanged for #$#%. Keep it clean, please.
Exceptions
We are people and regardless of the statements above, there will be exceptions for posting and not posting. Friends who post can say almost anything.
Trackbacks
Use the following link to trackback from your own site:
https://blog.jdpfu.com/trackbacks?article_id=589
So I recently moved this website from a non-standard port, 82, to port 80. It seems that most of the blog-posting-spam software couldn’t deal with that non-standard port because the few blog spam messages a week that I used to have has ballooned exponentially.
Today alone, I’ve seen more blog spam than I did the entire summer. Not good. With that knowledge, it appears my choice to moderate all comments was a good one so you don’t have to see all this crap.
Exponential doesn’t accurately describe the amount of blog spam seen the last 2 days. It was much more … then it stopped and I haven’t seen any the last day.
I guess spammers take Sunday off?
I read on another site that adding a hidden field to be completed and if it was completed – not to post those comments was a good idea. It doesn’t impact normal users, since they won’t see it and I can have the alternate text say something for sight-impaired visitors, but automated scripts will fill it in. Another options is to have a trivial, non-changing captcha with a math question. The site that did that said it didn’t catch 1 spammer the last 3 yrs but had worked for everyone else. I think that could be implemented easier.
Today I blocked 112.224.0.0/11 which is a pretty large section of the internet out of China. I didn’t want to, but the number of spam comments originating from there was becoming cumbersome.
I like free speech when it is on topic.
Blocked another huge group of IPs from Beijing, China. Blog spam. It sucks to block millions of IPs at a time. Mailto:anti-spam@ns.chinanet.cn.net enjoy.