Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Blog Spam
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.
In addition to the managerial issue of attempting to delete all of the comment spam that slips through the filters, there is also a technical issue. When you have hundreds of robots crawling every page of your site it creates additional load on the server, which in turn slows down the page responsiveness for real readers. In fact, since my server is already under heavy load I’ve been able to see in the server logs that robots have been the cause of more than one server crash.
This technical issue translates into real monetary loss for the webmasters, because in order to meet a reasonable page download expectation the hardware has to be upgraded to support the additional load. And it becomes a vicious cycle. The more popular a site is, the more under attack it is, and the more it costs to serve web pages.
Here now is a short video demonstration of the problem I’ve been facing lately as seen from the administration side of One Man’s Blog.
One email per post. Twenty years of this, still going. Unsubscribe whenever.
Blork I tried to install the Comment Timeout plugin on my blog which I just updated to 2.8.1 and its not working any ideas? It says on wordpress.org that its ok up to 2.8. Thanks for any suggestions. jon:)
Can’t see the video but understand clearly the issue, how do we stop someone from ID theft? And what a commerial blog? One that makes revenue from ads etc. thx
Blork,
Thanks for the tip. After getting almost 400 spams in moderation yesterday I installed the Comment Timeout plugin per your recommendation and since then I’ve only had 1 (unsure if any good comments got rejected though). So far the plugin seems to be working pretty well, though I have discovered a few little issues.
One time it wouldn’t let me leave a reply because it said my user agent had changed. Also, when I tried to turn off the option that disables comments on posts after a certain period of time it wouldn’t allow comments at all. But I’ll give the author some feedback and keep using it for now.
Thanks again for sharing,
John
The video worked for me. Thanks for that.
I have over 1400 posts on my blog, and I had been getting anywhere from 100 to 600 spams a day. They were pretty much all caught by Akismet, but it was still a pain, especially since I was inclined to look through them for “false positives” (I’d find one about every three weeks).
I recently installed the Comment Timeout plugin from James Mckay. It lets you set a cutoff point, after which the posts no longer accept comments. It’s not for everyone, but I figured that once a post is about two months old, I don’t feel bad about shutting down comments. (It keeps the ones that are already there). You also have the option of leaving comments open indefinitely for specified posts.
It’s a trade-off, but boy did it work! Almost immediately my spams were reduced to four or five a day. That’s way beyond my expectations!
Ok. The video is now working, though it’s a temporary measure. I’ve currently got it streaming directly from the server as opposed to streaming from a real video hosting site. Hopefully this article doesn’t get Dugg, or it will surely take down the server. :-)
As soon as I get Revver or one of the others working I’ll replace this version, even though the quality of this embedded video is much better than the others. Unfortunatly I just don’t think the server would ultimately be able to handle the strain of many streams.
Feel free to let me know what you think!
John
Well, we seem to be having some technical difficulties with Revver’s Video. Sorry about that folks. I’ll re-upload it elsewhere and see if we can’t get it working within a few hours.
John
My blog isn’t popular at all, and I still get thousands of spam. I made a post months ago, and for some reason tagged it porn. This post gets more spam, than any other. This tells me that some spambots look for keywords.
It failed to find it.