stargeek
Comment spam updateComment spam updateComment spam update 12/17/2004 06:44 PM I've taken additional steps to prevent comment spam which will no
longer affect normal site operation, so full posting features are once
again avaialable. This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Comment spam updateGrok Headline matches for Comment spam updateComment Spam (Again)Comment Spam (Again) 12/19/2004 02:58 PM To continue my own post about running MT-Blacklist: Comment spams blocked: 2735 Comment spams moderated: 238 Duplicates blocked: 1 Blacklist... Comment SpamComment Spam 10/28/2003 11:06 PM Now that I am back home and rested, it is time to share an amusing story... as Randy noticed, I got some comment spam on Monday, all referencing an online gambling site. 32 comments in the course of 65 minutes. The last 9 of which were not seen by anybody as I had blocked the ip address by then. 65 minutes to create. Carefully crafted to appear to be on topic. 10 seconds to wipe out. MT Comment SpamMT Comment Spam 01/16/2004 11:05 AM So let's say you run a reasonably popular weblog that's open to comments from anyone and everyone. Let's also say in the same breath that you don't necessarily believe that turning off comments on older entries is a good... MT Comment Spam FixMT Comment Spam Fix 06/22/2004 12:20 PM After the spam problem of a few weeks ago, I took a single step that Adam Kalsey talked about a long time ago that has fairly well fixed my spam problem: I renamed the Movable Type comments script. I have had exactly one spam in the last three weeks. Spam bots, it seems, are designed to go after the default script name. You can rename the script (view the source sometime to see what I called it) and change the value in the mt.cfg file. I'm sure my log file is full of 404 requests to mt-comments.cgi. It doesn't seem that spam bots are parsing the comment forms to find the name of the target script. It's probably just a matter of time. Click here to comment on this entry Comment Spam ChangesComment Spam Changes 03/06/2004 02:03 AM After giving up on the fight against Comment Spam on my blog, I have resorted to opening up comments on my most recent entries, and monitoring them for spam, and closing comments after they have had plenty of time to... "comment spam""comment spam" 07/05/2004 09:37 AM No more comment spamNo more comment spam 02/01/2005 09:33 PM I've been waiting forever for someone tp pick up doing a particular project to fight comment spam. A couple of days ago I got tired of waiting and put it together in an evening. It's no silver bullet, but it did cut the amount of comment spam I get down to a fraction of what it was before. And it should scale in a way so the spammers can't easily program their way around it if many people start using... Comment spamComment spam 12/09/2003 05:05 PM I started to come under comment spam fire again today. It didn’t last long. (It could be that they’re just taking a break.) What happens to people that they grow up to be so unethical? Just wondering. Comment spam againComment spam again 10/29/2003 01:15 AM I was recently hit by a mass comment spammer, leaving 21 comments on old entries in my blog, and so... new trends in comment spamnew trends in comment spam 08/02/2004 05:25 PM kalsey has some good info as well. the hard part is getting people to upgrade. United against comment spamUnited against comment spam 02/01/2005 08:43 PM This is already being blogged all over the place, but I have to shout about it, too: several major search and blogging organizations (including Google, Yahoo! and Six Apart) have agreed upon a simple method to significantly reduce comment spam. New comment spam techniqueNew comment spam technique 07/30/2004 01:38 AM The arms race against comment spammers has been stepped up a notch. I received a flurry of spam that linked to entries on other blogs. Curious to see what that was all about, I clicked on one of the links, fully expecting to be redirected to porn or an online casino. I was surprised to see a discussion of patent law; this comment spam linked to a legitimate site. The comment that I received was certainly spam — other than the odd link, it was the typical formula: the name was “online casinos,” fake generic email address, and a vapid comment. Certainly a Stanford law professor hadn’t actually sent the spam. There was another reason this spammer was promoting someone else’s blog entry.The blog entry in question was full of comment spam. In the last 3 months, this entry had accumulated thousands of spam links in the comments. It appears the spammers have a new tactic in increasing their PageRank. They find a site that doesn’t delete comment spam and fill it with links. Then they boost the PR of that site by spamming it in blog comments. Once the spam-friendly’s site has in increased Google ranking, all those spammed links in their comments will get a boost in rank as well. It’s rather clever, actually. I’m leaving out a link to the spam-ridden blog entry on purpose. I don’t want to give the spammers the link they want. If you want to see the page in question, find Elizabeth Rader’s March 1, 2004 entry called “All rights reserved in Birth Control for Flatworms” on cyberlaw.stanford.edu. If you are a site that is apathetic toward link spam, it is now time to choose a side. If you continue your apathy and allow comment spam links to linger on your site you are helping the spammers. Spam friendly sites will now be placed on the list of blacklisted domains that are not allowed to post comments on this site. In the war on spam if you are not for us; if you choose to look the other way and allow spammers to use your site; if you feel that keeping your site free from spam is too much trouble — you are against us. Fighting comment spamFighting comment spam 02/01/2005 08:40 PM Jay Allen has written a very nice document on how to fight comment spam Jay Allen should know a thing or two about comment spam. Before joing Six Apart he wrote the now famous MT-Blacklist plugin for Movable Type. If... comment spam eliminated?comment spam eliminated? 05/29/2004 07:36 PM Vive Le Canada,Canada-1 hour ago ... If you're interested, these comment spammers are trying to improve their ranking in google by dropping thousands of links to their shady websites all over the ... Comment Spam FloodComment Spam Flood 01/16/2004 11:33 AM I just got 500+ comment spams (mainly for zoo sex, apparently) from someone who changes IP addresses every 3 msgs and changes the offensive link in every message. This defeats the MT Blacklist program I've been relying on. Help! I don't have time to manually strip out 500 spams. I will have to close comments (if I can figure out how to do so for all previous entries).... Solving comment spamSolving comment spam 01/27/2004 10:57 PM There are two main schools of thought concerning comment spam: the optimists and the defeatists. Optimists believe that comment spam can be beaten with technology; defeatists (maybe I should call them pessimists) believe that comments are as doomed as email and we're all going to hell in a hand basket. The story so farI fall squarely in to the techno-optimist category. Back in September I started blacklisting domains linked to from spam comments, defending against return visits from spammers and allowing others to syndicate my block list to run on their own site. Then in October I tweaked my comment system to eliminate PageRank from links in comments, making spamming for search engine optimisation a futile exercise. Of course, this measure only works if spammers realise it's there (I know at least one has) which is why I'm personally very happy to see that the latest release of Moveable Type has adopted the technique - to mixed reviews from the MT community. There have been a whole bunch of other technological innovations over the past few months. Sam Ruby has implemented throttling to ban people who post three consecutive comments, and has some great ideas about guarding against strangers. Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist makes the blacklisting concept available to a wide audience. Meanwhile, James Seng's MT-Bayesian introduces trainable spam filters adapted from the fight against email spam. The challenges aheadSo those are the solutions so far; the critical question is whether they work. The amount of spam I've been getting has definitely decreased, but as I run a completely custom blogging system I'm safe from the automated scripts that target more widespread systems - other sites make easier targets. Now that the less ethical search engine optimisers have started to catch on to the potential of comment spam to improve their PageRank the amount of spam can only increase. Some bloggers have already started to disable comments entirely (thankfully Dan turned them back on again shortly afterwards), setting a worrying precedent for the elimination two way interactions comments allow between bloggers and non-bloggers. I'll put it in writing now: I will never disable comments on this blog. In the past few months the comments here have proved far more interesting and valuable than my actual posts, and I really appreciate the quality of the discussions that have arisen here. I will take whatever steps are necessary to keep this a useful environment for discussion. Many people have hailed user registration as the ultimate solution to spam. It isn't, because the value of PageRank is just too high - and writing a script to automatically create accounts (even with email confirmation required) is child's play to anyone who is competent in an internet-aware scripting language. Even accessibility-impeding captchas are no defence against spammers who can afford to employ cheap labour to defeat them - and with search engine rankings as critical as they are there's no shortage of spam dollars. With those ruled out, let's look at the remaining solutions: The killerWithout links, comment spam has no purpose. To eliminate spam, eliminate links. Redirecting them through a PageRank killer already achieves this, but proves too subtle for spammers intent on spreading their links as widely as they can. Too truly eliminate spam, strip out links and anything that even looks like a URL and force the spammer to preview their carefully crafted advertisement before hitting submit. Seeing as hyperlinks are the single most important feature of the web this may seem draconian - and indeed it is. But on a site that serves more as a discussion forum than a farm and where the alternative to killing links is killing comments entirely this could be the saving factor. For most blogs however links are an essential part of the discourse - I certainly wouldn't want to disable them here. Now only do they add huge value to the discussions, but more importantly they act as a "signature" for many commenters - knowing a comment is by "Dan" is far less useful than knowing that it's by Dan from www.simplebits.com. Finding a compromiseDraconian measures such as the above wouldn't be necessary if spammers would wise up to the fact that their carefully crafted missives were having no effect on their precious PageRank. The real challenge then is to make anti-PageRank measures obvious to even the most brain-addled viagra peddlers. I've taken the first step towards this by turning on compulsory previewing for comments, which should have the added benefit of reminding legitimate commenters to use paragraph tags. I'll be working on ways of making the anti PageRank measures more obvious over the next few days, as and when work permits. I've seen people argue that depriving legitimate commenters of PageRank is a poor compromise. I disagree: if the only cost of eliminating the incentive to spam is the loss of some Google ego then I see it as a price well worth paying. Of course, I say that as someone who's already built up their Google ego but at the end of the day it's my blog, my rules. One solution I've considered is creating a whitelist of sites that frequent commenters use in their signatures, causing them to be displayed without a redirect. Comment spam is a solvable problem. Furthermore, blogging about comment spamming is almost as dull as blogging about blogging. Let's hurry up and solve it so we can go back to blogging about cats. Comment and Trackback SpamComment and Trackback Spam 03/14/2005 05:05 PM Comment spam has increased to the point where I've reluctantly had to disable allowing unregistered readers to post comments for submission. I'm spending too much time cleaning it up as well as trackback spam. I am also disabling trackbacks. This is a shame as it undermines the connectivity that... Comment Spam AttackComment Spam Attack 02/05/2005 09:12 PM So, apparently I'm not the only one that was hit by some bleepity-bleep-bleep spammer trying to post 400+ comment spams to my blogs. MT-B blocked about 300 of them, moderated 80, and let 4 through. That's pretty decent. The other 80 all had the same base domain so future attacks will fail for that one domain. There are also regular expressions in place now that should moderate the more ... interesting ones. Your comments may get moderated if you include any terms relating
to animal sex or incest. If so, I'll notice when I check my mail next
and approve/reject it, so don't worry. A little delay is all. Keep
those illegal-in-Alabama discussions going! Woo! That said, I'm wondering if going TypeKey-only is the way to go. Yes, it makes you make an account (boo-hoo) but it keeps things a little more sane on the management end. If I get two more of these full-on assaults I'll do it, but not until then. It will alienate the more lazy amongst you. The Comment Spam Arms RaceThe Comment Spam Arms Race 09/15/2004 03:32 AM
"Mena on comment spam and the new
|
Also check out: |
