‘Spam’ Category

New Anti-Spam Strategy

17
responses
by
on
August 30th, 2011
in
Spam, WordPress

If you’re a WordPress user, you probably noticed an option at Settings -> Discussion, which states “Before a comment appears, comment author must have a previously approved comment.” This was pretty much the bulk of our anti-spam measures here, and while not a single bit of spam made it through, the sheer volume of pending comments (almost all spam) were driving us nuts. A few days ago, we shifted gears with tremendous results, and I though you folks might be interested. We decided to do away with the above setting and rely entirely on Akismet, Cookies for Comments, and the built-in moderation list and blacklist at Settings -> Discussion for any that snuck through. Prior to this change, we had an average of 5 pending comments each hour, and an average of 4.8 of those were spam. Now, we don’t have to monitor pending comments, and we only see an [...]

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Protect Yourself from Parasite Spam with Akismet

4
responses
by
on
September 6th, 2010
in
Blogging, Blogging News, Cool Scripts, Movable Type Plugins, Spam, Weblog Add-Ons, WordPress Plugins

If you run a social network or any kind of online publishing service, you will be hit by spam, if you haven’t been hit already, and Akismet wants to help. When most people hear about Akismet, they often think about WordPress, but Akismet is actually available for over twenty additional systems and platforms, including Movable Type, Drupal, phpBB, PunBB, and libraries for PHP, Python, and .NET. If you’re running, or planning to run, a social network or online publishing service, the Akismet team wants you to know that they can not only protect you from direct spam, but from parasite spam as well, as long as you can give them a way to contact you. Akismet’s pattern and volume monitoring abilities make direct spam easy to filter, but ever since the dawn of forums, spammers have opened accounts for the sole purpose hosting their spam on your site. Thanks to [...]

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Are You Spamming Comments Inadvertently?

67
responses
by
on
January 24th, 2010
in
Blogging Essays, Business of Blogging, Spam

In a blog post titles “6 Steps to Kill Your Community“, Matt listed “Allow Spam Through” as the second step and “Don’t Participate in Comments” as the fourth step to killing your community. We treat comments and reader participation very seriously at Weblog Tools Collection. We highlight commenters, try to identify the frequent comments who participate willingly and heuristically remove nofollow tags from the links of commenters who participate in the community. I have personally chosen and thanked frequent commenter by providing them deeper access and rights to the various portals, elevating and applauding their presence within the community and have chosen most of my co-authors based on their participation and passion within the communities that I purvey. In short, I agree with Matt in that relevant comments and passionate participation are the lifeblood of any community. But our little blog gets a lot of attention from spammers. We are [...]

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So we tried Intense Debate . . .

35
responses
by
on
November 22nd, 2009
in
Business of Blogging, Spam, WordPress Plugins

It was not meant to be. I had high hopes for Intense Debate but the drawbacks outweighed the positives in our case. I was really looking forward to a few of the features that I thought might bring more interactivity to the blog and encourage readers to have meatier discussions. As you notice below, we have turned off Intense Debate and gone back to the original comment form. Below is a list of the some of the features I was really looking forward to and our experiences with them. I would like to preface this discussion by saying that I screwed up the install by adding this blog onto the wrong account and that added to some of our woes. The account bug that followed (we received some help via the support email) was caused by my fat fingering. Better overall look and feel of the comment section of a [...]

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Make the web a cleaner place : adopt a Honey Pot

19
responses
by
on
May 3rd, 2007
in
HOW-TO, Spam, Web Ethics, WordPress Plugins

A few days ago, Project Honey Pot introduced a new service, http:BL, “a system that allows website administrators to take advantage of the data generated by Project Honey Pot in order to keep suspicious and malicious web robots off their sites”. A honeypot is a trap set to detect email havesters and spam robots : this should ring a bell to most bloggers, I guess. The beauty of Project Honey Pot is that anyone can contribute : just register an account, download the script and put it somewhere on your blog. It’s been more effective than I would have thought and wished : the day I had my first honeypot installed, it detected a new and before unseen comment spammer. Contributing to this project is an easy way of making the web a cleaner place, and it will also benefit to another WordPress related spam-fighting project : the almighty Bad [...]

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