Bleh! More Comment Spam
Since Thursday morning, I have received 51 blog comments. Two have been legitimate comments. The last thirty-six hours have been another record for getting hard hit with comment spam.
I checked the discussion groups of a few other blogs, but didn’t notice the same kind of spamming happening there. I don’t get it. Some spammers post links on other sites to boost their page rank in search engines. One way this works is by making it look like a highly ranked site points to their site. There’s no way my site is ranked that high. I refuse to believe it. And I certainly can’t be more popular than the Redhead, who didn’t seem to be collecting the junk that’s been hitting me.
Here are some resources about comment spam:
- The Online Journalism Review examines it in Bloggers Declare War on Comment Spam, but Can They Win? It even mentions how comment spam might effect whether news organizations want to include comments on blogs on their sites. It also lists some steps bloggers and programmers are taking to ward off comment spam. I like the idea of being able to legally charge spammers money, but would tracking them down really be worth the effort? A number of links in this article might be worth investigating.
- A developer’s efforts to tame comment spam using Bayesian logic
- The BBC’s Bill Thompson writes about being flyblogged and adds some perspective to the phenomenon.
- A Wired News article includes a quote from Search Engine Watch’s Danny Sullivan (spammers: read this closely) that says that comment spammers overestimate the power blogs have on search engines.
- Some bloggers, like Ross on Many-2-Many, suggest turning off comments and moving related discussions elsewhere.
- Joi Ito mentions some of the challenges of identifying comment spam.
- Wikipedia calls it Link spam
Another downside to comment spam on these blogs is that commenters are automatically added to a membership list on this blog. I just deleted a whole bunch of their registrations on this list (like at least 50 identities of 200). (I don’t think I axed any legitimate members, but if I did, my apologies.)
At least I’m not getting comment spam like I get spam e-mail. I probably get close to 100 junk e-mails a day between my eight e-mail accounts. Comment spam is just nastier because it’s much more complicated to find and delete.
For those of you considering blog software, find out how the software handles comments, comment spam, and deleting comments before making your decision.
Addendum 10/23, 4 pm: I’ve received 36 comments since about midnight last night. I haven’t looked at all of them yet, but I can tell you I don’t usually receive so many comments in a day. I’m guessing the flood of comment spam continues. Gggrrr
