A few weeks back, I had a poll on the amount of Spam Emails you get as an entrepreneur with different sites and blogs up and running. At the time, I reported that I received between 0-10 emails only per day, and that was really at the lower end of the spectrum.
Recently, I’ve been getting more and more spam comments on my blog, averaging at around 20-30 per day. This is getting ridiculous. The reason why you havn’t been seeing them is because I have stringent moderating procedures in place. I don’t know what I’d do without Akismet. It stops my inbox getting clogged up with fake comments. Also on a sidenote if your comment doesn’t get approved and is caught by the spam filter, just email me or I’ll try and find your comment.
Anyway, as I’ve been ignoring the comments and not allowing them on the site, this may help the situation, as spammers will be noticing that they are wasting their time. If you’re reading this spambot - just realise that you’re not going to get through, so stop trying to access my comments. Can anything be done about this growing problem. I’ve known some people to turn off their comments altogether. Heck - even Darren Rowse recently had to turn his off for the night due to so many dodgy comments being let through his system.
What is the internet coming to and how can we stop these people jamming up servers and using up bandwidth. Anyone else experiencing growing spam levels? Sorry to keep ranting on - but its doing my head in!
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11 responses so far ↓
1 Paul // Aug 2, 2006 at 8:52 am
20-30 a day is nothing, I’m usually getting somewhere in the region of 100/day hitting my main blog and that’s not particularly well-known.
2 adnan // Aug 2, 2006 at 9:29 am
Wow Paul that is a lot. I take it you use spam filters like Akismet. It really helps, but still something should be done about the current state of spam.
I think it increases because a few silly people don’t moderate their blogs properly and so spammers think that their comments are working. Everyone should be strong and stop the comments from being broadcasted to the world.
3 Paul // Aug 2, 2006 at 9:38 am
I use Akismet, but the spam comments are still filling up space in my database because I just mark them as unapproved rather than not letting them through. I may change that policy soon though as the last time I purged the spam comments I had >6000 to delete (thankfully the design of the tables allows me to wipe them all with one SQL query).
Of course, with that many spams some will inevitably get through, although I’m surprised that Akismet doesn’t catch them because to me they’re obviously spam. I know that you can flag false negatives but I haven’t written an interface to do that yet.
4 adnan // Aug 2, 2006 at 9:45 am
Yeah, the comments fill up my database too. But its pretty easy to delete so its not that much of a problem. Don’t you just use the “Delete All” button.
I don’t mind the odd 1 or 2 getting through, but its the bulk URL link comments that annoy me!
5 Paul // Aug 2, 2006 at 9:48 am
I’m running my own custom blog software that I wrote myself - there isn’t a delete all button as at the moment I do everything in phpMyAdmin because I haven’t got round to writing an admin interface.
6 adnan // Aug 2, 2006 at 9:52 am
Oh right, that sounds pretty cool actually. Yeah with Wordpress its so much easier, because you just go to Manage > Akismet > Delete All. Why don’t you use Wordpress? Is it just because you like the satisfaction of making your own?
7 Paul // Aug 2, 2006 at 9:58 am
Actually, a lot of my blogs are still running WP 1.5.x, so I can’t use Akismet on them, though I really should get round to upgrading them at some point.
The reason I don’t use WordPress on my personal blog is because when I started blogging there WP was still pretty rubbish (I think it was at version 1.2) and the templating system was, and in my opinion still is, horrible (why couldn’t they use Smarty instead of creating yet another templating system for people to learn?). If I used WP, my blog would end up looking like every other WP blog, because I doubt I could have customised the templates to make it look like the way my custom system does.
8 adnan // Aug 2, 2006 at 10:01 am
Yeah you def. should upgrade, there’s more security updates with later versions, so maybe that might help with the spam levels.
Anyway good luck with your custom CMS!
9 Khalid // Aug 2, 2006 at 1:05 pm
Install Spam Karma on your blog, it has worked wonders for me.
10 adnan // Aug 2, 2006 at 1:23 pm
I actually installed SpamKarma 2. However I found that Akismet did the job pretty well anyway, and I didn’t want to have 2 spam filters on the blog! Thanks for your comment!
11 Noobpreneur // Jul 29, 2008 at 4:16 pm
I’ve got about 20-30 spams through my blog, and about 100 a day overall.
Opening my email inbox is like opening presents for Christmas! You just don’t know what;s in them
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