Tuesday 29 January 2013

Vigilant, Fastidious & Diligent

I've been getting a lot of Spam lately (Spam as in junk mail not Spam® as in the canned precooked meat product). I've always received a certain amount of spam comments on BLMA but until recently this was a handful each week and easily eradicated. All part of the rich tapestry of the Internet, filtered by Blogger and easily eradicated without it ever reaching the eyes of my readers. But just before Christmas the volume of Spam received on BLMA jumped and has now reached annoying levels. 

Spam Comments are an everyday occurrence for most bloggers and (in my experience) are largely from that ubiquitous Internet user 'Mr Anonymous'. Some are comedy gold having clearly been written by a computer and then translated from Chinese or Russian into a bizarre version of English that has to be read to be believed. But no matter how funny some of these are they all have a sting in the tail, a link that isn't what it appears.

Most of the Spam I have had recently seems to be associated with Internet Gambling sites rather than porn, but very few of the spam comments are honest in their statements. None say "Visit my roulette website here..." and the only real intention of this unsolicited mail is to improved the page ranking of their website by scattering the Internet with back-links. Blogger automatically applies the "nofollow" tag to all comments, so back-links receive no Page Rank boost, but of course that doesn't stop the spam-bot from dumping in your comments folder in the first place. 

A wealth of words! 

My Spam is still largely being filtered and deleted before it reaches the public pages of BLMA but the volume of Spam has increased enormously over the last two months. I now regularly receive a couple of dozen Spam Comments per day and although for the most part it is still being caught by the filters built into Blogger its taking longer every day to eradicate. Despite this I'm not about to activate further security measures just yet. My views on Captchas are well known and I would only resort to these if large amounts of spam were getting past the filter's to the front pages. 

I'll remain "vigilant, fastidious & diligent" and will of course continue hitting the delete button as long as the spam-bots pursue their pointless business of clogging up the Internet with cr*p. But just in case I accidentally delete a genuine comment (thankfully this has only happened a couple of times) please bare with me and re-send your thoughts in. I still value genuine feedback and the vast majority of the conversations that take place on BLMA are conducted by living, breathing gamers with something worthwhile to contribute.

13 comments:

  1. A victim of your own sucess. Being a minow I have had not one single peice of SPAM so far, although I accept it is only a matter of time.

    Keep up the great blogging and dont't let the cyber b*st*rds wear you down!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So It's my own fault...should have guessed! LoL.

      Delete
  2. I to have noticed an upsurge from Mr Anonymous since Dec and bloody annoying it is too. Some days there are loads others none

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 99% of it is caught out by the spam filter and I just have to mop up by deleting it. But I am paranoid about accidentally deleting a valid comment that has been filtered in error.

      Delete
  3. I feel for you, but have been (touch wood) spam free since I ticked the box that said only registered users can comment.....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I tried that last year and for 24 hours nobody could leave a comment. No idea why but this didn't work for my site so I just turned it back. At least the in built filter is capturing the vast majority of spam comments [basically anything with a back-link in it] and all I have to do is delete or identify as "not spam" as appropriate.

      Delete
  4. One of my posts for some reason is the source of 95% of my spam. I guess it has made it on to some spammers list (it's about the Pacific navy war so I can't imagine it's phrases that triggered it). I found blocking anonymous comments solved the problem entirely. It may mean a couple of readers can't say anything, but it's better than having to filter out the trash.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I too have had a very large increase in Spam, today I received 47 comments from our pal Anony Mouse. Yesterday my Google email was hacked as well, bloody arseholes!!!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I´m not having spam problems but I'm receiving views from very-very bizarre websites (including a very hot-porno one....)

    ReplyDelete
  7. I have one particular post which also seems to attract all the spam but, as you say, i'ts easy enough to delete.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I too have got a couple of persistent spammers who put comments like 'I'm really interested in this subject. Why not see what I've said about your post here'. I'm canny enough not to fall for this obvious ploy but it has certainly ranked up recently. The price of success?

    ReplyDelete
  9. Wow I guess I've been lucky that my blogs have always been small fish and haven't had much in the spam department. Seeing your post and the comments of others have me looking into spam detection and filters in my WordPress software. Keep up the great posts sir!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Maybe because I am a lightweight blogger I have not had it so bad with spam comments. Hope it stays that way.
    Cheers

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for leaving a comment. I always try to reply as soon as I can, so why not pop back later and continue the conversation. In the meantime, keep rolling high!