Blog Comment Spam Gone Wild

By Terry

At this point the comment spam is beyond crazy.

SuperAff has been hammered for the past 48 hrs - more so than usual - plus all that wonderful referrer spam as the cherry on top.

Everything from ‘weather’ to ‘Phentermine’ to ‘make a million dollars’ to ’seo’ and ‘articles’ and ‘ebooks’ and ‘porn’ … and on and on it goes my friend. Groovy.

FYI:

The comment counts on the right sidebar may be a bit wonky sometimes (now is a good example) as some of the blog comment spam is getting sent straight to ‘HELL’ before I even see it.

Oh well. I can live with that ;).

7 Responses to “Blog Comment Spam Gone Wild”

  1. I’ve had the exact same problem lately with my site as well. I don’t know where this sudden surge of blog spam is coming from and to be quite honest I’m finding the type of spam a bit confusing - I’ve got people spamming links to CNN, Yahoo, Australian newspapers… weird…weird. Then I get the usual Phentermine ads, etc. Since upgrading to Wordpress 2.0 - it’s caught them all in the filters - but it just is such a drag to think that the site is really starting to pick up in popularity when you see 212 comments in moderation and realize that not one is any good.

    BOOOOO…. I hate spam.

  2. but it just is such a drag to think that the site is really starting to pick up in popularity when you see 212 comments in moderation and realize that not one is any good.

    That’s the thing - the legit comments are getting lost in the spam. If this keeps up, maybe the answer is to have members join the blog first before they can comment? And manually approve new members before they can post a comment?

    Just thoughts at this point.

  3. I just hate that it happens, I’m more for the open commentary - without having signups (because I personally am not a fan of that)… but you know, there might just not be any other way to make them stop.

    *bah*

  4. Defeating comment spam is basically what we are trying to obtain with our proposal of a reputation system for blog comments.
    There are lengthy posts about it on the Clipperz blog. (www.clipperz.net)

    To test this proposal we are planning to:
    - design an API for the reputation managers;
    - implement a functional and free reputation manager service at clipperz.com (the site will go live shortly)
    - (trying to) implement reputation modules for a couple of leading blogging platforms (with a lot of help from their communities)

    Anyone interested?

  5. Terry @ SuperAff.comThat looks interesting Marco, but does it involve clipperz tracking all your blog comments? I didn’t have a lot of time to read through it, I’ll do so when I have more time.

  6. Terry,
    Clipperz will not track all your blog comments, but only the feedbacks from the blogs where you placed your comments. (Actually they are implicit feedbacks: published=positive, rejected=negative.) Clipperz (or any other compliant reputation manager will then compute your reputation for the requesting blog.

    We are working right now on a Drupal module. I will be honored if you could test it on your blog when ready. Many thanks, Marco

  7. Terry @ SuperAff.comSure Marco I’d be willing to give it a shot here on superaff. Keep me in mind when you’re ready to test.

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