Look, there is no delicate way to put this. Bob Donovan, I hereby formally invite you to participate with me in a no-holds-barred MMA style cage match to be broadcast on live television. I’m 100% serious. Because I want to kick your ass, and I’m quite sure I can do it too.

Wait! What’s Going On Here?

My other dear readers may be asking themselves, who is this Bob Donovan, and what exactly has he done to John P.? Well, I’ve got no idea who Bob Donovan is, but what he did to me was send me an annoying Twitter spam with a link to nothing other than an affiliate site (belonging to 10 Best Hosting 2009).

Oh, and that link does nothing other than direct traffic to the Web site link http://www.10besthosting2009.com/#1492937361/. You see that number at the end? I’m sure that is an affiliate tracking link, and 10 Best Hosting is paying this spammer to fish people in to their Web site. That is assuming they are not directly behind it!
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Dammit! Very few things actually infuriate me more than spammers. That is because Spammers are thieves! There is no difference between a spammer, and someone who would go around stealing pennies from everyone they can find. The logic is exactly the same too, “well, if I only steal from them a little, they won’t notice – but if I do it from a lot of people, I’ll get rich!”

I swear to God, I think the crime for spamming should be death by firing squad. And their entire families should be branded with a scarlet letter and humiliated. And their bodies should be burned until nothing remains but ash. Then, the ashes should be put in a plastic baggie which is also topped off with cow manure and a small chunk of lead. The bags should be loaded on a cargo ship crossing the ocean, and then dropped in when the boat is directly above the Mariana Trench.

Here, let me rank criminals for you:

1. Child Molesters
2. Rapists
3. Spammers
4. Murders
5. Politicians

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Yeah. That’s how they get you, isn’t it? The spammers… they suck you in with these headlines like “Free Porn!”, “Free Viagra”, “Free Men’s Enhancements” and more. They litter our inboxes with this crap and put banner ads in places they don’t even belong. Well, I’m pleased to tell you that one of the biggest spammers in the universe was shut down yesterday.

The iEEE Spectrum most accurately reported:

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was able to persuade a federal court in Chicago to freeze the assets and order the shut down of HerbalKing, reputed to be one of the largest spam e-mailers, for violating the Can-Spam Act of 2003, the New York Times reports this week.

The Times story reported that SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group, estimated that HerbalKing was responsible for sending out one-third of all spam at one point, which included everything from replica watches to (naturally) herbal pills.

The FTC said that HerbalKing was able to send out billions of spam e-mails through the use of botnets. One botnet was made up of 35,000 computers and was able to send 10 billion e-mail messages a day.

The story quotes a senior technology consultant at Sophos, a spam-fighting security firm as saying, “It wouldn’t be a surprise if people don’t notice any difference in their in-box tomorrow morning.”

But the Times of London wrote a much spicier version… even if they did get the facts off a bit:
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Listen up folks, cause I’m only going to say this one time. If you are choosing your site’s theme based on how many ads you can shove in your visitor’s face, or if people come to your site and have to scroll down the page before they see anything other than Google Ads, then your site sucks. And you do too.

Here’s an example:

Someone stopped by my site and left a comment on the blog with a link to the site in this image. I marked it as spam as soon as I verified the site was MFA. I’ll continue marking MFA sites as spam until the day I die, and I hope that all of my fellow webmasters admin their comments and do likewise.
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Well, looks like it only took about 3.5 weeks to bump the number of Spam responses up over 200,000.

So, I hit the 100,000 mark on May 7, the 175,000 mark on August 7, and the 200,000 mark on September 2. It looks like I’m averaging about 25,000 Spam comments per month, or over 800 spam comments per day!!! To put this in perspective, I currently have just over 9,000 legitimate, approved comments on the blog.

At the current rate we should wrap up 2008 with over 300,000 and then in 2009 we should see the 700,000 mark. Of course, I would assume that the numbers will increase, and if they do there could be well over 1,000,000 spam comments on this blog by the end of 2009.

I can’t wait until the first time some geeky Webmaster tracks down a spammer and murders him just for spamming. I will contribute to his defense fund. Furthermore, I’ll vote for any presidential candidate who promises to make Spamming a capital offense punishable by death (or at least time in a federal prison.).

Thanks to Automattic for Akismet, without which I would probably have quit blogging.

Well, it was exactly three months ago that I shared the fact that this blog had reached the 100,000 spam mark according to the spam fighting plugin Akismet. But it looks like in the last 24 hours the count has crept up above the 175,000 mark.

76,000 spam comments in 90 days is just a little out of hand, don’t you think? So, this is why I heavily moderate comments and delete anything that looks spammy. You would have thought that maybe they would simply go elsewhere since it’s not getting through. But instead they just keep increasing.

You know, I think of myself as a pretty prolific blogger. With over 1,100 posts in under two years, its hard to find others who can match my output. So would it surprise you to learn that even with multiple anti-spam measures in place, there are 100 Spams posted to OMB for every post I write!

That’s right. Akismet alone has saved you guys from reading over 100,000 spam comments, so a big huge thanks goes out to Matt Mullenweg and the gang over at Automattic for offering this service.

Lately I’ve noticed some new and disturbing trends in blog spamming techniques. Among the most prevalent are commenters who spend time building up a considerable number of comment back links on a seemingly non-commercial site in order to later convert that site into a commercial free-for-all.

This behavior is inherently unethical. Bloggers, like myself, only allow links to be associated with commenter’s names for the purpose of getting to know who they are, not so our visitors will follow links only to be subjected to commercial solicitation. Posing as legitimate is nothing new, spammers have been faking regular commenter names for a while now.

On this blog, my own Terms of Use specifically prohibit such activity – though I have to delete posts all day, every day for violating them. On this blog alone Akismet has marked 71,000 Spam comments. And that is nowhere near the total number of Spammers stopped.
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News that shouldn’t be missed:

• Miniature Earth (Must see!)
• Crack Users Do More Time Than People Convicted of Manslaughter
• Five Years in Jail for Porn Spammers
• It’s Now Illegal to Feed the Homeless
• Scientists Invent 30 Year Continuous Power Laptop Battery

Have a great weekend!

Lately I’ve noticed some sneaky bastard(s) Spammer has been posing as regular commentors and trying to post comments with their names, but using an alternate URL. A couple of you have noticed and caught this as well, and I would encourage everyone to help me keep an eye out for this kind of thing in the future.

SPAM sucks doesn’t it? Trust me… I know. I created this video as an open message for the entire blogging community, but also specifically to help educate my own readers about some of the issues we’re facing on One Man’s Blog currently.

As the popularity of this blog has increased, so have the number of attacks from automated systems wishing to spam the comments on every single post. This can create a serious nightmare for a blogger like myself because, after all, there is only one of me.
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It pains me to report this, because the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form version 2 from Mike Cherim and Mike Jolley seems to be a nice contact form for Wordpress, but the fact remains that this plug-in is dangerous and designed to secretly Spam blogs on which it is placed.

This stems from the fact there is an option that users believe will disable the display of credit links back to the author’s web sites; however, this option does not actually remove the links. It merely makes them invisible – and this is enough to cause Google to remove a site.
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