How comment spam destroys blogs
Others have commented on this, but I wanted to add my part. The two most recent posts (before this one) on this blog have already received comment spam. They will have been in existence for one and two days respectively. I have installed a plugin that closes comments on all posts after seven days, but is that too large a margin?
The problem is not only one of annoyance, it’s one of blog viability as well. My provider almost shut down my previous blog – or suggested I switch to one that costs $100/month – solely due to the amount of resources eaten up by comment spammers. Of course, figuring that out took several hours in and of itself, which is a cost to my productivity.
If anyone has suggestions on how else to deal with this, let me know. Again, the problem is not solely that I have to delete and/or moderate. It’s also the resources eaten up by these scoundrels.
August 17th, 2005 at 7:19 am
If you’re not too wed to the WordPress platform, I’d make the suggestion to move to a service like TypePad. The advantages of TypePad includes the fact that they host a whole lot of blogs and using those blogs’ comments as input, they do a really good job identifying comment spam and blacklistin the spammers before it becomes a problem. I’ll have maybe five spam comments slip through every month, though I have posts going back two years. For ~$15 a month, I get spam and trackback filtering, they host the server and worry about backups, and they worry about the scummy people looking to screw up blogging for the rest of us. In return I give up things like running PHP to do custom things on my pages, but I’ve done okay simply using client-side JavaScript.
August 17th, 2005 at 8:14 am
I have had the same problem. I’ve gotten as many as 300 spam comments in a day. It’s not that I need a newer and more clever way to catch them; even when my filters do catch them it’s still taxing my bandwidth, my server, my app, etc. I’ve had recent periods where my blog was inaccessible, just couldn’t be reached. Then mysteriously it’s back. I check the error logs and see some script has been hammering away at me looking for MovableType files to spam me (I use WP). Just the act of my server going “what do you want? MT? No, I don’t have that. What do you want? MT? No, I don’t have that.” five jillion times is enough to bring my blog to its knees. And not a single spam comment results from it all.
Bastards. I have the perfect metaphor for what these folks do: they pee in our pool. For a little gain to themselves they ruin things for everyone else.
August 17th, 2005 at 10:56 am
Oh, wow, I didn’t realize that blog spam was such an issue. I guess it seems only natural for people to exploit blogs given the amount of e-mail spam circulating. That is rather unfortunate.