I’ve been getting a lot more spam comments on this blog. It’s frustrating enough that I haven’t been dedicating the time to writing new posts, but the time I do dedicate to my blog has been spent deleting hundreds of messages at a time.
I’ve found some interesting spam messages. Today I learned about someone supposedly trying to propose to his girlfriend by having everyone forward his proposal. The idea is that it will eventually get forwarded to his girlfriend. Cute.
Otherwise, I get spam about drugs, mortgages, and porn. Oh, and the spam that doesn’t seem to have a purpose other than to give the McLeod Brothers material for their Spamland videos.
I sometimes wonder if I couldn’t do a better job of spamming people. There has to be a better way to get past spam filters than making your message so diluted that no one knows why you’re trying to contact them. Yeah, spamming is easier than actually doing the work to cultivate a relationship with your customers, but how fulfilling can it possibly be?
9 replies on “The Return of Spam”
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Best blog-based spam filter ever. It catches 99% of everything. You will basically never worry about spam again. 🙂 It worked wonders for me.
Wow, that sounded like a spam itself, didn’t it? 😉
It’s only spam if I wasn’t asking for it, and I guess my blog post was a cry for help if there ever was one. B-)
I used to get 100’s of spam comments each week on my blog. I installed a wordpress plug-in called recaptcha.
Since then the spam has stopped, well, I get perhaps 1 or 2 per month now, which may just be down to someone manually spamming the comments. Either way, much better than before 🙂
URL If you want to check it out, you can see it in action on my blog
http://recaptcha.net/
still not sure what recaptcha is all about even after reading the site.
Ken – its the crap you have to type (read the letters in this image, listen to this sound clip, add these numbers etc) to determine if you’re a person or not:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
I believe if you sign up for a wordpress account, they have some spam filtering as well, my brother started a blog (shameless plug! – http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog) and claims that its caught *every* spam comment, it works well enough that he doesn’t even approve comments anymore!
I agree using something like a “read the letters in this image” tool that should eliminate if not all spam but 99.9% I am working on setting up a forum and Blog for my game company to connect the community/players with the developers and our process better and was looking into anti spam tools such as this.
what happens when someone types something in, and it’s not right because the person can’t figure it out either? (i’m talking about this plugin not the actual captcha thingies themselves)
Today’s battle:
1 comment approved
674 comments marked as spam
Also it seems most of the spam is due to trackbacks so captcha seems to be of limited utility.
@Keith – they probably get a few chances, perhaps blocked from commenting for a hour if they exceed them.