Spamtastic Advice for Bloggers!
This is going to be one of my shortest posts, but an important one to all bloggers. I just finished doing regular maintenance on all my blogs and was amazed at the tremendous increase the amount of Spam during the past week. I had over 200 spam comments on this blog alone. That is an increase of 600% over the typical amount of spam I receive.
Sure, I could give the typical (and critical) advice that all bloggers need a top notch spam blogging plugin. But here is some equally important advice:
Don’t just delete spam. Be sure it is tagged as spam!
Akismet, the plugin I use (and recommend) finds 99.9+% of all spam on my blogs, but occasionally something slips through. And when it does, you should be sure that it’s identified as spam according to the procedures of your software. Doing so (at least with Akismet) added that commentor to the larger spammer list shared by everyone using that software. As part of the blogging community, you are doing your part to clean up the Internet graffiti (well, graffiti minus the artistic value).
UPDATE: Wow, there were 44 new spam comments since I wrote this post 10 hours ago! Have you seen an increase in spam on your blog?
[PhotoCredit:BennyYap]
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Comments
Yeah you are absolutely right, Jim. It’s one of those things you can’t manage a blog without. It’s just so indispensable I couldn’t find anything as effective as Akismet.
Yan
I’ve seen a huge increase in spam on my social bookmarking site. It’s been tough keeping up with it – about an hours work every day. I haven’t found a fool proof method for keeping that spam out, Akismet doesn’t quite do it.
I agree with you, tagging them as Spam would help eliminate spam comments from your blog. I just hate it when I have to manually delete spam comments everyday.
Yeah, really akismet meets the purpose. I have tried it and it works fine. Spam should be handled the way it is done by Akisket.
Great Work, Great Post, Stay away from spams, always.
No increase in spam comments, or spam emails on this email, but my super secret private email though is getting hammered with spam. And most is slipping past the filters and rules. Most of it is for “watches”.
Another tip that can help if you get truck loads of spam comments is to keep a check on the IP addresses that are coming in. For about a week I had a particular IP address that sent a comment in about every 10 minutes and although Akismet was blocking them all, it began to get really annoying for checking through the rest of the spam and retrieving the odd comment that is mistakenly marked by Akismet.
Solution: Add a deny rule for the ip address in your .htaccess file… e.g…
order allow,deny
deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
allow from all
Cheers, Dan
Funny – I have been using Akismet for years and never realised the “community” aspect that tagging a commenter as a spammer helps other Wordpress owners. What a nice thought – I will adopt this policy from now on!
I have a wordpress blog and without akismet I couldn’t imagine running that site. I think spam can’t be totally avoided though, even with the plugin. But it certainly helps.
I agree that if you have a wordpress blog, you really should have Akismet installed however it still needs some common sense as well, ie don’t rely solely on Akismet, check the comments too, especially if many are from a single IP address.
Hmm..Seriously I wonder when spammer list is collected, who is going to do anything on them? Is there such a thing call spammer list? (Anyway I have no idea how askimet works but it really works!)
Sometime spam is one thing but phishing is really another that is intolerable!
Thanks for this useful post. Does word press has the capability of finding spams? Because I have many of my blogs with WP.
@Graham Cox – I’m not sure if WordPress comes with Akismet since it was a very long time ago I installed WP. However, you could just check. If it dosen’t have, you have to install external plugins.
Good advise, Jim. I have solely depended on Askimet to fight those spams and I’m quiet satisfied with its performance so far.
I had it without Akismet on another blog just to measure its effectiveness and you’d not believe the amount of spams I’m receiving each day.
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It sounds like a great application.The way you have described all the things are superb.Thanks a lot for the nice tips sharing with us.Keep blogging.
Jim, my little blog is new and I get several spams per day, I believe they are from the same source. Akismet catches them, but I have just been deleting. How do I identify it as spam? I didn’t know that could be done. Thanks for the tip.