Archives for July 2008

I’m so sick of spammers. Over the last month or so I’ve had a steady increase of comment spammers on all my sites, however this blog seems to be getting hit the worst.

Over a year ago I added the WordPress Bad Behavior plugin to my anti-spam arsenal and the amount of spam I was getting on this blog (in comment moderation of course) immediately went down from 400 to 500 comment spam per day to only one to ten. I use Akismet as well to protect my blog from spammers.

Bad Behavior has a fairly recent update so I’ll update the plugin in a little while and hope that that helps combat some of the spam. I’m sure some of the new spam is coming from bots.

If that doesn’t work I might start closing comments on all my old posts. I don’t really want to do that as sometimes I do get real comments on my old posts, but I will if I must. Perhaps I’ll add Spam Karma to my arsenal however I’ve never really liked that plugin and what I’ve been using up until now has done the job.

Notice to any human comment spammers – particularly those getting paid to post comments. Don’t bother stopping here and leaving comments that don’t make sense and links to competing niche websites or questionable websites as I’ll just delete your comment.

I’m a do follow blogger so this blog tends to get more comment spam than ones that remain nofollow. As a result I’ve always heavily moderated my comments. I don’t care for lots of extra links in comments, nor do I like urls to business websites in comments that are gushing about a product or service. Those comments BTW are usually written quite poorly, but not all of them are – either way, if I think you are just leaving a comment to get a do follow link I’m apt to delete the url or the whole comment.

I hope that this post doesn’t discourage visitors leaving real comments. Like most bloggers I love getting comments on my posts (and yes I should reply to the comments more often!). Please don’t stop commenting just because I said I moderate heavily.

It’s to the spammers or those just seeking do follow links that I’m directing this rant.

• People that leave three to five comments with the same IP yet each comment links to a different website, different pages of a website or uses a different SEO term as the link text on multiple.
• Comments that don’t make a whole lot of sense or add anything at all to the post or the comment discussion that’s already been started by visitors who were interested in leaving real comments and input on my post.
• Commentors that leave the same comment on a post on each of my blogs or perhaps different comments (usually spammy) on almost all of my blogs within an hour or so. It’s very obvious that they’re following a do follow list when they do this.

I’m sure I make mistakes sometimes and delete a real comment or remove an url that perhaps was on a real comment that I mistook as coming from a spammer or dofollow link seeker. Please forgive me if I have removed a comment that was not from a spammer.

It’s just that I get well over 100 comments on most days across my various blogs that I must approve, moderate or delete as spam (not counting the ones that are listed in the Akismet section as already being spam). A high percentage of these comments are from paid commenters, spammers and those who are not really interested in my posts but are just seeking links. I have to be a tough moderator.

Spam comments are something that all bloggers have to deal with, perhaps new blogs and bloggers haven’t experienced it yet, but as your blog ages and hopefully becomes more popular you will encounter spam comments.

I’d love to get your input as to how you feel about spammers:

• Anyone else being hit with a lot of extra spam these days?
• How do you handle the situation?
• What plugins or add ons do you use on your site(s) to combat spam?
• Do you moderate your comments heavily as well? Or do you just delete anything questionable?

I’m looking forward to reading your replies.