[rozwado1]

I've gotten comment spam from insurance companies, incest porn sites, and cialis knock-offs - and I managed to delete them and block the IPs with little hassle. I just checked my email and got 175 spam comments today from soem online poker ring - all over my blog posts and from different IPs. What a pain in my a**.

So who spams your blog, and what do you do to prevent it?

[BlueSky]

Convert your email link to ASCII

[mrfrost]

What kind of blog?

[ambush]

I got like (no joke) 100 blog spam today.

WTF is this, a ****ing epidemy?

[rozwado1]

Originally posted by mrfrost:
What kind of blog?

just the one in my sig. Life and other bs that only family/friends look at.

[Turias]

I use Geeklog which now ships with the SpamX plugin. With those two installed, I haven't gotten a single comment spam.

[mrfrost]

Originally posted by rozwado1:
just the one in my sig. Life and other bs that only family/friends look at.

ah ok, moveabletype. Check this.

http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/

[Komisar]

black list does nothing we used it on our site and we just filtered the good spam and all we got was rape.... it got so bad we turned of commenting...

[SafariX]

I have a joke-blog site that gets spammed by online casinos. I decided to edit the PHP table in mysql, and now its betta!

[Diggory Laycock]

http://www.gudlyf.com/index.php?p=376

I use a CAPTCHA - highly effective.

[Oisín]

I get quite a bit of spam on mine too, but word filtering combined with mass mode editing (WordPress) works well for me. I don't get any more of these online casino spams anymore 'cause I added the most common words like 'casino', 'gambling', etc. to the word filter. I'll do the same to any new crap that comes up...

Edit: Mass mode editing = mass editing mode. It's word about order the all.

[calamar1]

mine used to get clobbered too--about 600 a week, really disgusting stuff, too. upgrading to mt 3.0 made it easier to delete, at least. unfortunately, my host doesn't have the necessary perl support for mt-blacklist, so i had to turn on typekey registration, which kinda puts a damper on commenting.

[Xeo]

Originally posted by Bluesky:
Convert your email link to ASCII

I'm sorry but anyone who thinks that will stop a harvester is only fooling themselves. Why would anyone think a harvester wouldn't just convert HTML entities to their regular characters just the same as web browsers do? It's not like some magical code or something.

Personally I just don't even hide my e-mail address anymore. I just have proper filtering and I don't have to deal with them.

As for this topic, I didn't even know this was a problem. Man, I would really like to see some statistical evidence that spamming helps making anyone money. Especially in this day where everyone knows what spam is and sees it as annoying. Why would anyone think that spamming will get someone to visit their site?

[Oisín]

Originally posted by Xeo:
As for this topic, I didn't even know this was a problem. Man, I would really like to see some statistical evidence that spamming helps making anyone money. Especially in this day where everyone knows what spam is and sees it as annoying. Why would anyone think that spamming will get someone to visit their site?

Not everyone. Lots of people are still new to the Internet, especially in developing countries. There's a young Chinese guy staying in our apartment here, and he's fairly dumb with the Internet. If something says "free" or promises anything (in other words, if it's spam), he clicks on it, 'cause he believes in it.

Also, because he doesn't speak English, he doesn't understand what the spam says. So he clicks on it to see if it has the content in Chinese too (he seems to think that everybody in the world speaks Chinese, and that they just use all the other languages of the world for fun or something ), and subsequently clicks on any links it contains, for the same reason.

I've tried teaching him about these things countless times, but he just keeps saying things like, "No no, it's okay, look, it says it's free".

Unfortunately, there are a lot of his type in many parts of the world.

[Xeo]

Originally posted by Ois�n:
Unfortunately, there are a lot of his type in many parts of the world.

Well that is very interesting and something I didn't know. But if that's the target market, going after people who don't know the language you are spamming in, then I guess by all means, spammers, keep paying for that bandwidth.

[DigitalEl]

Not everyone. Lots of people are still new to the Internet, especially in developing countries. There's a young Chinese guy staying in our apartment here, and he's fairly dumb with the Internet. If something says "free" or promises anything (in other words, if it's spam), he clicks on it, 'cause he believes in it.

And it's not just people in other parts of the world. My parents, along with many older people, I imagine, sometimes don't know better. Hell, people are still buying those "Internet appliance" units to get the web on their TV. Those sort of noobs generally haven't a clue.

I would really like to see some statistical evidence that spamming helps making anyone money. Especially in this day where everyone knows what spam is and sees it as annoying. Why would anyone think that spamming will get someone to visit their site?

Spam is so cheap to distribute, you only need a few people to bite for it to pay for itself. It's that one limp dude who actually bought Viagra after getting an e-mail who funded more spam for thousands and thousands of others. A senior I know (read: not my parents) bought $2,000 worth of day trading software after reading a get-rich quick spam. These are the same mathematically-challenged people who buy lottery tickets and send money to strangers in Nigeria because of a phone call. They're not bad people. The technology has just passed them by at the same time their judgment and common sense are starting to leave them.

[RGB]

Originally posted by rozwado1:
I've gotten comment spam from insurance companies, incest porn sites, and cialis knock-offs - and I managed to delete them and block the IPs with little hassle. I just checked my email and got 175 spam comments today from soem online poker ring - all over my blog posts and from different IPs. What a pain in my a**.

So who spams your blog, and what do you do to prevent it?

Poker / gambling ring has hit my site the last two days as well.

[sworthy]

I'd like to think even spammers would stop if it wasn't working. The sheer fact that they're still here shows that it works at least sometimes.

Anyone heard any progress on spam legislation?

[sir_hc]

Someone mentioned encoding to ascii and yes it doesn't work. But I use this and I get zero spam.

Enkoder

Used to be from Hiveware I think but they seem to have changed to Automatic something.

Anyway it works for me.

[Xeo]

Originally posted by sir_hc:
Someone mentioned encoding to ascii and yes it doesn't work. But I use this and I get zero spam.

Enkoder

Used to be from Hiveware I think but they seem to have changed to Automatic something.

Anyway it works for me.

That is much more interesting.

[Miniryu]

I use Xanga and I have never recieved blog spam. But I guess the more sophisticated bloggers out there want to be able to run their own blog without relying on someone else's service.

[Komisar]

Like i said earlier we used Movable type for our old site and intend on switching to wordpress, does anyone know about spam in relation to the word press blogger?

[mdc]

i read about renaming your comments file in your movable type folder and then showing the change in your mt.cgi file.

i am sure you can find how to reflect the changes in your mt.cgi file, or i can find the email i got all the info in if you want.

[ReggieX]

Can't you just turn off anonymous commenting?

[Xeo]

Today, I had an interesting coincidence. So as my earlier post mentioned, I didn't even know this type of spam existed before this thread. Now today, on a class trip to an ISP, my networking prof was talking about the math and comp sci blog getting spam comments every day by the hundreds. He said the filtering keeps them from getting posted but he has to manually check each one for deletion and was considering ways of streamlining it. I found it interesting that the topic came up so quickly after this thread. Anyway, on to the point.

After talking through it and proposing many ideas, including forcing people to register if off campus, I came up with an unoriginal but nevertheless useful idea. What about those image boxes? Like, the ones when you sign up for an e-mail account or something and you have to type the letters and numbers you see on an obscured image. You could keep anonymous posting on and just have whoever is typing it do that. Those spams aren't hand typed and wouldn't be able to fill in that blank, right?

So we're going to do that, I think, for that blog. I said I'd look into what it takes, find some prewritten scripts that do it and implement it.

[edit] This idea has been used in blogs and plugins exist for many major blog softwares out there. Just a heads up. Search for "security image" and add in your blog software name to find some matches.

[Diggory Laycock]

Xeo - See my earlier post - they're called CAPTCHAs.

[Mastrap]

Originally posted by Komisar:
Like i said earlier we used Movable type for our old site and intend on switching to wordpress, does anyone know about spam in relation to the word press blogger?

off topic: I wouldn't. I used both WP and MT and in my personal opinion MT is far, far superior to WP. MT is a fully blown CMS whereas WP is ok for publishing a blog but really not much else.

Your mileage may vary of course

[breadiu]

Here is a solution for Movable Type - http://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/scode.phphttp://mt-plugins.org/archives/entry/scode.php

[sworthy]

I just saw this over at fark today...

One in Five Buy Their Software Via Spam

[Eug Wanker]

I've encountered a new form of blog spam:

http://www.blogexplosion.com/

Somebody commented in my blog just so I'd go to his referral link at that site.

Leverage the power of viral marketing!"

[FulcrumPilot]

Sue them and make money.

[Luca Rescigno]

Is there any way to make it so you have to register in order to post a comment? That ought to get rid of all the spam. Not sure though, I've never blogged so I don't know exactly how it works. But it seems to me that it would make it super easy to police - hardly any would get through, and the occasional tenacious spammer would be easy to simply ban.

[Axo1ot1]

Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
I've encountered a new form of blog spam:

http://www.blogexplosion.com/

Somebody commented in my blog just so I'd go to his referral link at that site.

Leverage the power of viral marketing!"

Yeah...that's the slimy way to promo your blog...

[Xeo]

Originally posted by Luca Rescigno:
Is there any way to make it so you have to register in order to post a comment? That ought to get rid of all the spam. Not sure though, I've never blogged so I don't know exactly how it works. But it seems to me that it would make it super easy to police - hardly any would get through, and the occasional tenacious spammer would be easy to simply ban.

There are all kinds of ways to fight it. Registration is one but then, do you really want to force all your readers to be registered? They just might not care enough.

[Sherwin]

Easy solution: don't blog. Buy a guitar and play that instead.

[turtle777]

Originally posted by Sherwin:
Easy solution: don't blog. Buy a guitar and play that instead.

My thought exactly !

-t

[Oneota]

[Edit: (nm)]

[MacMan4000]

Originally posted by sir_hc:
Someone mentioned encoding to ascii and yes it doesn't work. But I use this and I get zero spam.

Enkoder

Used to be from Hiveware I think but they seem to have changed to Automatic something.

Anyway it works for me.

I forgot what site I found to hide my email address, but you can see the results at my site, in the "contact" section. here is the link. It seems to work fine for me... only one spam since the site started.