Fighting spam on a blog

Posted on October 8, 2007 in Blogging & Blog Doohickies by DM

You wouldn’t think one would have to worry about spam on a blog. After all, the blogger is the one controlling the content. Well that’s certainly true as far as the individual posts, but when it comes to comments it’s kind of an ongoing battle. Yes, there are spammers out there who target the comment sections of various blogs, looking for places to put their porn links and other unwelcome commercials. I use the WordPress blog platform for all my blogs, and there’s a great software plug-in for fighting spam in WordPress comments called Akismet. It generally works really well.

Here’s an example, though, of how stupid these spammers are: today in my Akismet spam filter I found a comment that was intended to be placed on my post about dishes and dinnerware. In that post I mentioned how much I love Depression Glass. The spammer in this case? A website devoted to treating depression. Obviously, the spam system that website is using to promote itself is simply looking for a keyword (”depression”) without excluding the really obvious unrelated stuff like “Depression glass.”

I’ve also noticed something else: over on my now-idle Marketing Idea Blog, where I haven’t posted much for the past month, there are now some spammy comments actually getting past Akismet. So far I’ve logged in every few days to delete them, but frankly I let that blog go idle because I didn’t have time or desire to maintain it any longer. I’m certainly not interested in paying a hosting fee for it just so I can check in every three days to delete spam comments. So I’m thinking about compiling all the posts into a PDF file, which I’d make available as a free download, and then dismantling the rest of the site. That will take some time, but then I’d be done with it.

UDPATE 10/9: Wow, two more spam-comment attempts by the same “depression” website discussed above, trying to link to my dinnerware post. If I’d known it’d be that popular… LOL.. obviously it’s some kind of automated effort.

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