Damned spammers!
Somehow comment spammers for a site advertising products related to blood pressure devices and medications have managed to get through Blogger's word verification system for comments. Before that, yesterday it was a bunch of spams for a Pink Panther DVD collection. Just this morning, I deleted five comment spams that arrived just this morning since 6 AM, for a rate of about one per hour thus far. (In fact, one arrived while I was typing this short little announcement.) I haven't done it yet, but if this spam mini-flood keeps up, gets worse, and starts to cause a real problem, I may be forced to turn on on comment verification for a while until the spam assault abates.
Just so you all know the reason if I end up deciding sometime in the next couple of days that I need to turn on comment moderation again.
Out of curiosity, has any other blogger been getting these spams?
Just so you all know the reason if I end up deciding sometime in the next couple of days that I need to turn on comment moderation again.
Out of curiosity, has any other blogger been getting these spams?
check out driftglass. . .he seems to have come up with a simple, elegant solution that they haven't managed to crack. his first post for several months has been a "mosquito net". seems to work perfectly.
ReplyDeleteSpammers probably outsourced it so that cheap overseas labor, folks who couldn't quite make the customer service cut, is manually entering the codes and getting paid a fraction of a cent per post....
ReplyDeleteI don't have either moderation or word identification (not blind-friendly) on, but spam comments have gone down over the last few months. I'm probably free-riding on you big-namers, but the fact that I promptly delete spam comments might have something to do with it, too.
I am getting spammed, as you noticed when you popped in this morning, Orac. I delete spams promptly, too, but it takes AWHILE to find them since I have 360 individual essays to look through.
ReplyDeleteI think there ought to be a "trial period" for each blog for commenters before their messages are automatically posted to that blog's comments section. That way, we can get around the moderation-only option (not attractive), but also give the blog author some control over whose comments are automatically popsted. Not foolproof, but it is enough of a hassle that I think it would strongly discourage spamweasels.
GrrlScientist
There ought to be some way of "easily" tracking/searching for these hidden comments - I get them too and generally don't bother to look for them.
ReplyDeleteI figure if they're hidden back in the depths of my blog, noone will read them anyway.
I don't know about anyone else, but I simply set Blogger to send me an e-mail any time there is a comment. A link to the post where the comment was made appears in the e-mail message. It's quite easy to go straight to the relevant post that way. What I then do is to delete the comment spam, and, if the post is more than a couple of months old, I open it and turn off comments, so that no further comments can be made.
ReplyDeleteTo the point that GrrlScientist brings up regarding spam on older posts--one solution (elegant and wonderfully simple) is used over at Burning Bird: Shelley (and others, elsewhere) just shuts down comments on a post after a given point in time.
ReplyDeleteNaturally this doesn't intercept spam on newer entries, but it does tend to improve the signal to noise ratio.