Friday, August 19, 2005

Spam Bites Blog

Over the past few days, this blog has been hit by spammers who post unrelated comments to specific posts. I have removed most of the spam, but here's an example:
='Brand New News Fr0m The Timber Industry!!'=

========Latest Profile==========
Energy & Asset Technology, Inc. (EGTY)
Current Price $0.15
================================

Recognize this undiscovered gem which is poised to jump!!

Please read the following Announcement in its Entierty and
Consider the Possibilities�
Watch this One to Trad,e!

[... and so on ...]
I am currently using the basic Blogger comments feature. I suppose this means I will have to replace it with comments from SquawkBox.tv or some other source. I'm open to suggestions. Please post a comment if you have some relevant advice. Of course if it's spam, I'll just delete it.
 

5 comments:

Pete Lyons said...

On a weird note related to the spam you received, Brian's blog received the same spam on his post that pointed to yours.

I've been seeing an increase as well but what's weird about the spam I've been recieving is that it's all aimed at my Notes Hannover Waffle post from a couple of months ago. In my case all the spam content is related to gambling. Why they picked that post is beyond me.

Ned Batchelder said...

I get a few spam messages a day, and there are of two clear types: one particular page (How to make Coffee Stirrer Stars) gets a spam post about once a week. This spam is very short, with a single link.

The other type gets sprayed randomly across all my posts, also has only one link, but has hundreds of random garbage words mixed into it. I can exclude the second type automatically because it usually has odd punctuation (like double commas). The first type I have to expunge by hand.

I probably don't get much spam because I hand-rolled my comment system. I used enetation first, though, and it worked well. I don't know how they held up under the comment spam blizzards.

directorblue said...

I use haloscan for popup comments (w/ spam suppression) and trackback. No complaints.

Dave Delay said...

Thanks to everyone for the help. I might try Haloscan as Doug suggested. It sounds easy enough to integrate and the trackback feature is nice.

Dave Delay said...

On second thought, I am going to stick with Blogger comments for now. I couldn't find an easy way to preserve Blogger comments on old posts and show HaloScan comments on new posts.

For now I've enabled word verification to prevent autogenerated spam. Let's see how that works.

I've also enabled HaloScan trackback. Again, thanks for the help.