Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Spam - Help!
First things first - why am I getting so many spam comments? My post Sightings of Worried Man in Blue Car seems especially popular with spam that seems to be advertising WOW Gold, which, prolonged introspection suggests, may be something to do with World of Warcraft, a time murderer for idiots. I thought word verification was supposed to stop this. Any ideas?
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
don't know but I suspect word verification security is so old it's about as useful as a chocolate fire guard. It's only going to hinder humans.
ReplyDeleteAs a celebrity blogger you are going to attract more interest. Maybe you need to use a unique blogging platform rather than one from Blogger.
I'm guessing, of course.
Celebrity? That's pushing it.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Brit, what about 'mandarin' - Mandarin Blogger sounds good
ReplyDeletehe's been on Richard & Judy, don't you know?
ReplyDelete(...for want of a better word, then. I'm word thick and haven't got time to peruse the thesaurus).
media blogger! it's all coming back to me now....
ReplyDeleteA bindrune of Elhaz and Thurisaz?
ReplyDeleteYou only need worry when DFS hacks into your blog. Rename it "The Mandelson Hour" who would want the deposit spam in that?
ReplyDeleteMy understanding is that almost all captcha systems (word verification) have long been cracked by the spambot crowd.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what the Blogger system allows by way of discouraging spammers. Other systems can be set to ask you to answer a simple question, like adding 12+6 for example, which is intended to foil the automated attacks. Maybe there's an add-in for this?
Wordpress and some other platforms run a system whereby any comments are checked against a web service like Akismet or Mollom to see whether they look like spam. If they do, the comment is deleted or held for moderation. Again, I don't know whether Blogger has a similar system nor whether this method is actually effective.
There are a few other tricks, like adding hidden fields, but if effective (I've never tried it) that's one for your cyberwonks.
It may be worth looking at a different system, like Wordpress which also allows you to host a blog on their servers. Or, asking your cyberwonks to take a look at other platforms - Typepad, Drupal, etc. - and hosting yourself, stand-alone. Changing might mean more work and more expense, though.
As Ian says, I suppose the problem is that a popular, well-known blog is always going to attract more attention.
You could sit on line all day and intercept all comments yourself in real time... it works for me!!
ReplyDeletewheres the butter?
ReplyDeletesee that got through
... hey?
1915
ReplyDeleteI'd strongly recommend migrating to wordpress and using Akismet which gets rid of 99% of all spam. If you need help doing it, let me know.
ReplyDelete