04/07: Blog Comment and Trackback Spam (Part 1)

Any blogger nowadays is faced with the irritation of comment and trackback spam. Fortunately there are more and more anti-spam measures available to us, but the fact remains that there are so many spammers out there, it will always be a thorn in the side of bloggers and despite the anti spam tools available, it still makes for extra work and time that could be far better spent on other things. So, where does it come from and what defences does a blogger have in the face of this relentless onslaught of spam? This is a huge subject with both the spammers and the defenders devising ever more sophisticated ways of defeating one another - a single blog post cannot cover all the ground, so we will try to look at subjects individually as time goes by...................

Once, spam, or unsolicited email, was exactly that - mail sent to email accounts without the users consent. An electronic version of the junk mail sent to millions of postal addresses every day. People soon recognized the potential and cost effectiveness of junk email and a whole new marketing industry was born. Email addresses were the new digital gold and were sold and traded by companies and individuals without a thought for the end recipients, software was soon developed to "harvest" email addresses from the internet and soon, nobody was immune anymore. Of course, the marketers and bulk emailers were soon being decried as the "gutter marketers" of the internet and the fight against unsolicited digital communication soon spawned an industry all of its own - those finding new ways to try and get round anti spam "legislation" and prevention and those trying to prevent the whole tawdry business. I guess a great number of people can be thankful for the birth of spam as it has certainly developed into a major business, whichever side of the fence you happen to be on, but things are rarely that simple. 

For bloggers, forum owners, Wiki owners and webmasters, spammers represent a completely unwanted nuisance. With the crackdown on unsolicited email, the spammers have turned their attention towards all of these areas with a vengeance. This is bad news for site owners. Nowadays, automated scripts that read everything on your web site, harvest email addresses, and post spam directly to your site are commonplace. They also put false referrers in your server log trying to get their links posted through your stats page. This causes several problems. First, the spammers are wasting your bandwidth, which you may well be paying for. Second, they are posting comments to any form they can find, filling your web site with unwanted (and unpaid!) ads for their products. Last but not least, they harvest any email addresses they can find and sell those to other spammers, who fill your inbox with more unwanted ads.

Personally I used to wonder why people got so heated up over spam - when it first started becoming a problem, the delete key was all you needed, but as the plague has spread, this really is no longer the case. Spamming is bad, wasting resources like nothing else, but there are always those who will exploit it for financial gain. Spammers are often born out of desperation - when legitimate marketing and advertising does not work, there are always plenty of people willing to resort to more shady methods. You only have to look at the number of blog blaster, forum blaster, RSS blaster types software on the market to see how big a business this is - don't be fooled by the sales hype - most of these tools will make you a spammer and they are not a solution to your marketing needs or success. The classified ad sites, once so popular, were hugely damaged by programs designed to "blanket bomb" them with ads, and resulted in classified ad sites becoming less and less effective for marketers as they were forced to tighten their posting rules. Whatever your view of spam, it is a cancer - the scattergun approach is becoming less and less effective but despite this, more and more people are lured towards it every day - some are genuinely misguided people looking for their way to "make it" online, but regardless of your ignorance, don't expect any sympathy from the site owners you spam.

So, what can you do? As a blogger you are going to need to put some defences in place. Our next post will look at ways in which website owners can protect themselves from this thorn in their side. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to combat spam, a great deal of them are free and only require a little effort on behalf of the blogger or webmaster.

TCH - The Fight Against Spam