Blog Comment Spam - A Sign of Popularity?

As my blog sites get more notice, I inevitably get more user comments. WebbyOnline itself has been getting more notice these days, and the last couple of posts have gotten more user comments than I used to get by a long shot. This is obviously good, and any blogger will tell you that it is the comments and the visitors that justify the effort. However, with the increase in comments I have also been noticing a significant increase in blog comment spam. None of it makes it to the website. Wordpress has the built-in Akismet spam filter and it does a fairly good job of killing spam without bothering me. But, it isn’t perfect so I get routine emails throughout the day from Wordpress telling me a new comment is awaiting my approval. And its spam.

The blog comment spam is just an unfortunate side effect of having a noticed blog site. To prove that, I recently resurrected BUZZscreen.com and began posting more regularly over there. Within just a few days of increasing my posting frequency, I started to get comment spam yet again. And that is after several weeks of nothing. So, sticking your head up means the spammers notice you and try to shit all over your blog.

Girls and Pills 

The spam is the same predictable crap. Mostly links to porn sites. Second to that is viagra and various pills to enhance portions of the male anatomy. The theory is, of course, that by posting these links all over blogs that Google will pick up on those links and index them after having visited my site. We all know that search engines LOVE blogs, especially when they are updated often. Webbyonline is spidered by Google almost every day. But, what these idiot spammers don’t realize is that (a) I’m not going to display the comment, (b) Google won’t index them anyway due to the nofollow attribute on the links. So, it just isn’t going to help them. But, likely what I’m dealing with here is a software robot that is designed to find active blogs and spam the hell out of them. I doubt I’m dealing with an actual person here. Spammers are in the numbers game. They know that their efforts are going to be blocked on the vast majority of sites. However, those few where it works are what earn them their bread and butter. It’s a dirty game, but if it didn’t work to some degree, they wouldn’t be doing it.

How To Control It 

In my case, what I do is set Wordpress up so that I have to moderate all comments posted to the site. You can control those options in Options > Discussion. How other blog software handles it I don’t know, but I assume they all have similar options. This is what I do, but I understand some blog owners may not want moderated comments. They may want people to be able to comment freely with no delay. I can understand that because, yeah, as of now when somebody comments here on Webby, it does not appear on the site until I go approve it. So, what can you do if you don’t wish to manually moderate comments?

• Use CAPTCHA. This is that weird string of characters in an image which you have to type to prove you are human. For some brain trivia, CAPTCHA actually stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”. CAPTCHA can block most spammers, however the good ones have ways of bypassing this.
• Using Another Kind of Challenge. Since CAPTCHA is not exactly bulletproof, there are other ways of doing it. For example, you can ask a person “1+2=” and they have to enter “3″. Or you can give them a list of words (randomly) and tell them to pick the “fouth” one (again, random).
• Require email confirmation of posts. Will work, but its a collosal pain in the ass for your visitors.

Since I’m a Wordpress guy, I thought I would mention a few plug-ins to help combat spam. Aside from these, the Akismet filter comes built-in, so if you don’t have an API key for that, go and get one. You get an API key by registering for a free Wordpress.com account. Its free, and the filter works pretty well. Let’s just say that I’ve had times where this blog has been hit with several hundred spam comments in a short amount of time and Akismet caught almost every single one without bothering me. So, I recommend it. Aside from that,

• Spam Karma 2
• CAPTCHA plug-in for Wordpress
• Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin
• Comments Post Rewriter

Blog spam is kind of a fact of life. We all just need to find ways of dealing with it.

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