06/07: Blog Comment and Trackback Spam (Part 2)

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Having looked at the problem of comment and trackback spam the other day I was bombarded both here and on another blog with a flood of spamming which seemed rather ironic, but I long ago ceased to be surprised by the influx of this rubbish. As a blogger or webmaster it's just a fact of life and there are many ways to deal with it. 

The thing that makes me laugh is that the people behind the spam are often hopelessly ignorant and don't realize just how much time they are wasting. Certainly the more savvy spammer is a tricky opponent but a vast number of those sending out this junk honestly think that they will  generate traffic and make sales through their efforts. If you have a list of email addresses it doesn't matter how big that list may be if 98% of them are undeliverable, and likewise, you can have thousands of blog URL's and maybe get your ridiculous comments posted on a tiny fraction of them. Many of those will soon be deleted once the owner catches on, leaving you with probably a handful of places where your link has been planted and an even lesser number of likely clicks on your blatant ad for pills or whatever it is you're peddling this week.......

I have  to chuckle when I think of some of these people, having bought into some blasting software and reading the tips provided by the  seller of said software.....make your comments useful, make it look as though you're contributing something....blah blah blah. If you're never going to set eyes on the blogs you're spamming, how on earth can you do that? As an example here are just a few of the comments recently recieved on some of my blogs, you judge for yourselves;

Very superior site. Good job. thnx.

You have an outstanding good and well structured site. I enjoyed browsing through it

Realy, realy nice work! I was impressed! My own are.....

I am so thankful for finding your website!

Hehe! Good work!

Very pretty design! Keep working. Go on!

Only we should be responsible to the information we post to our blogs. Congratulations to your blog! More Power!

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OK, enough, you get my point. I mean what are these people on? Most of the links accompanying these "comments" relate to the usual gambling, adult, pharmaceutical or get rich quick type nonsense but the pill pushers are definitely the most prolific. You have to wonder just how gullible they really are and I would certainly welcome comments from some of you...maybe dmonti@hushmail.com or  isanches@gmail.com or perhaps kwilson@lycos.com or any of the others dumb enough to use a real mail domain - yes I know it is pointless and childish to name and shame and these will all doubtless be undeliverable but maybe they'll find their way onto a list.

Interestingly one of the latest "tactics" seems to be to use a free forum provider as a URL - the spammer, usually from Eastern Europe or Asia looking at my latest posts, directs you to a free forum address and then redirects to another domain. I don't really understand why they do this, perhaps in an amateur attempt to disguise the domain they are spamming from? Who knows? If you are a free forum provider you might want to look closely at this kind of abuse though. Just a thought. I did find a  fairly old post at Performancing.com about the exploitation of Plone websites  at one time and wonder if this a similar method - if anyone technical can explain it would be appreciated. 

I will get to some more specifics in part 3 of this mini series and I'm hoping that there will be some experts out there willing to contribute to that discussion but what I thought I'd talk about today are a couple of measures in place on this blog, which runs on the Nucleus CMS platform. Luckily for users like me, there are plenty of hardworking developers out there who work on a huge variety of plugins, many of them dealing with the problems of spam. 

Firstly, any comments left here are immediately put into a moderation queue - this means that no spammy comments will ever get published because every single one is checked by a human being. Yes, it's an extra job but it takes a few seconds to bulk delete all the crap. There are many publishers who simply disable commenting options but to me that's just giving in to the spammers and taking away an essential part of a blog's appeal - the ability to interact with readers and allow them to have their say and gain important links. 

Trackbacks are slightly more tricky, but, once again a simple plugin blocks all trackbacks here until they have been approved, so it's almost impossible for the spammers to succeed in anything other than being an annoyance. 

Some people take things further and come up with nifty little plugins in the fight against spam. One such Nucleus plugin is SpamTrap which inserts random addresses from domains where spam originates, effectively giving the spammers email addresses to harvest so that the  perpetrators can all send their spam to each other, thus devaluing their ill gotten lists. I have thought of posting lists of the email addresses of spammers in a name and shame type of effort but doing that here would be pointless simply because all email addresses published here are protected by another plugin in an attempt to prevent spam bots collecting them from these pages. Like everything else though, it's not watertight so maybe the examples above might get harvested. 

If you are a blogger, no matter what platform you use, you will be a recipient of comment and trackback spam and you will want to put measures in place to control it as much as possible.  Next time we will take a look at  some of the tools available to you. 

TCH 

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