Spam In The Form of Comments
Sep 20th, 2006 by Don Ray
I remember when I first started blogging that you had to pay attention to all comments that you received. There are spammers that are extremely effective in using spam bots to fill your blog with all sort of nasty unwanted spam comments. To make it difficult to find, the spammers don’t comment on the current posts. They run through your blog until they find old posts and use them as their target.
At first, I had so few people reading my blog that it was easy to just manually delete the comments. Manually isn’t the best way to control it for a couple of reasons. First the delay factor allows the comments to be read by anyone until you get it removed. Second, it is easy to get careless and miss some spam and you won’t know about it until some one reads it and sends you an email.
WordPress has made spam control very easy. It has a built-in plugin, called Akismet, that is very effective. I also use another plugin called Bad Behavior. Between the two, I rarely have to do anything anymore in managing spam.
Below you can see the how these products have helped me.
Akismet has caught 10,023 spam for you since you first installed it.
Bad Behavior has blocked 1039 access attempts in the last 7 days.
If you are blogging and have some spam hummingbird (colibri in Spanish) sticking its beak into your pretty petals of polished prose, then you may want to check into some of the automated spam guards.
This is a great post. I don’t use either of these products primarily because I am on EFx2 and I think they are using it/them/or something similar. I was wondering about my personal websites but then got to thinking that over the last 10-12 years I can actually count one or two spam attempts that were successful. I think that is primarily because I had no where to leave comments on those websites. Now, however, I do but I get so few comments it is pretty easy to find them.
I don’t have a huge database in an archive either. I don’t see any sense in trying to maintain an archive over a month or more, so I delete everything after a short period of time. I recently deleted over 500 posts, photos and all. I have them backed up on external hard drives but they are gone from the blogs, and websites.
After using some tracking programs I discovered that archives are almost never visited and when you can look at the pages people actually visit, I found it was related to the most recent posts. There were older posts with titles that grabbed attention and caused visitors to call them up from the archives but not enough traffic to justify keeping them in an archive.
This post was most interesting and caused me to think about security and things like that. Those people who spam, I have found, are almost always associated somehow with porn, and it is revealed when you begin the process of checking them out.
Well my site is a little different from yours and hence keeping a larger archive makes sense in my mind. I think a lot of folks find my site because they are interested in seeing a little about what life is like living in Panama in a retirement status.
Since it is a blog, it contains some posts that are material to what people might be interested in and some that aren’t. Sometimes people have some faith that if they just start at the first and read forward, they may find a gem.
It reminds me of the boy that was tossed into a room of manure. He happily started digging into the manure. People wondered how he could be so happy digging through the huge dung heap. When asked he simply replied. With this much crap, I just know there has to be a pony somewhere underneath.