Spam Comments.
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Akismet has so far protected my blog to the extent of 8,620 spams caught, 5,786 legitimate comments, and an overall accuracy rate of 99.174%. It is however a chore to go through everyday to ensure that some genuine comment does not get filtered out by Akismet.
In the last one week however, I have been getting an unusually large number of spam comments, on one day going up to 123! Otherwise, the average is around forty per day, but during the last week the figures have been hovering around 60!
Many comments are in Russian and a lot of them try to persuade me to purchase medicine (!) online.
I wonder if other readers have also noticed such increased spam comments. I look forward to hearing from the other bloggers about their experience.
Thank you.
I haven’t noticed any great increase. I’ll let you know if that changes.
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
November 30th, 2009 at 21:06
Thank you Jean.
From what I can see spam comments generally appear on older posts. I got one last week. It was some online money service looking for business. I knew there was something fishy when I saw it because it started off saying ‘gaelikaa.blogspot.com is great, I read gaelikaa.blogspot.com every day……’ I mean, come on! Then it had links to two or three financial service websites. I was about to delete it but my daughter (MelRoXx) suggested that as it wasn’t offensive as such, why bother?
Another spam appeared on an old post one day. It was a sales pitch for….of all things, viagra! Hey, I know Yash and I are a middle-aged couple but………well, I binned that one fairly rapidly.
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
November 30th, 2009 at 21:06
You are very lucky. I wonder if my high rate of spamming is because I use my own domain. I must check that out too. In any case, I have now blocked comments on posts older than thirty days and perhaps, the spams will reduce.
Ramana, you’ve got it bad. Commiserations. You have been invaded.
Until I changed service provider and updated my protection I had about four offers a day for Viagra (supplied from the States). It was annoying particularly as I am not exactly the target market and who wants to be reminded of other people’s withering sex drive every half an hour.
I now live in paradise minus the snake. ONE (yes, really) spam in seven months! It’s heaven.
U
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
November 30th, 2009 at 21:00
Lucky you. Actually, read it as I envy you. After reading Mike’s comments, I have just activated a plug in that will close comments after thirty days, and it should help.
This last month I received about 15 spam comment about viagra. I had delete it as soon as I read it.
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
November 30th, 2009 at 20:58
Sensible thing to do Tikno. Why dont’t you blog about it?
You’ll see I recently posted about a partcularly troublesome Korean Spam comment that I got recently which proved almost impossible to delete. It seems many other blogspot bloggers have had the same problem. I ended up having to turn on comment moderation which I wasn’t happy with because I do prefer to make commenting as easy as possible.
I wouldnt mind so much if the spammers were at least a bit more erudite and managed to string together even one reasonable sentence that addressed the subject of the post they are spamming.
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
November 30th, 2009 at 20:57
Some of them are beginning to do so, and I allow their comments to stand. The Korean spammer has not yet bit me!
I always get a few “spam comments” from BKB, Conrad, Grannymar, Deb, and Rummy, but otherwise I’m spam free. Is there a filter for this? LOL
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
November 30th, 2009 at 20:56
You are blessed then Mayo. The spammers that you list are indeed worthy commentators. You do not really need a fllter.
I used to have a lot, but, with the newer versions of Wordpress, I’ve turned comments off for older posts. The quantity of spam comments dropped drastically. Now I average about 10 to 20 a week, at most.
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
November 30th, 2009 at 20:53
I have activated the plug in now and let us see what happens now. Thanks for the pointer.
Cheerful Monk (336 comments.) Reply:
December 2nd, 2009 at 10:51
I could sure use that. Could you tell me the name of the plugin? Thanks.
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
December 3rd, 2009 at 20:09
http://jamesmckay.net/code/comment-timeout/
If you have something else in mind, please email me and I shall send the link.
There was a time when the number of spams was almost 200 per day. I used the MailWasher program to clear most of them, while spam blocking tools blocked many good emails from people like my customer when he was trying to place a new order!
About two years ago this suddenly dropped, so I presume my Internet Service Provider did something. Now I get about 2 or 3 spams a day. I use MailWasher to clear my wife’s spam too. It seems that things still bounce now and then.
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
December 1st, 2009 at 13:19
I checked out Mailwasher. It appears to be for emails. My emails spams are very efficiently caught by gmail. The ones that get by are the rummuser domain address. I wonder if I should put in Mailwasher for that. Shall consult the techie (my son Ranjan) and do the needful. Thanks for the pointer.
Looney (128 comments.) Reply:
December 1st, 2009 at 20:35
Apparently I didn’t read your original post carefully enough!
Out of 1,118 posts I had 14,791 approved comments; Akismet has protected my site from 50,473 spam comments, and my average at the moment is about two a day. I notice a marked change with a deluge of spam when college term begins here. Don’t ask me why or how, it just happens.
I had a phpBB internet forum up at one time but ended up taking it down because it was deluged with spam and I spent more time administering the spam side of it than I was able to give to the forum. Its surprisingly easy for these guys to spam. They can get past capthcas with image recognition software. I have used wordpress also for some time and I must say that Akismet was wonderful at keeping spam away.
Rummuser (1423 comments.) Reply:
December 1st, 2009 at 13:16
Bunc, my problem I suspect is due to spammers wanting to get links or whatever. Akismet does a great job of isolating them. My problem is to go through the whole lot to ensure that genuine ones do not get deleted.
No major increase on my blog.
Oh yeah Rummuser, it’s gotten really heavy lately. The odd thing is that they all seem to go after the same post, not spread themselves around. But Askimet is catching all of it, so I’m fairly happy.
Well, it’s catching all the Russian spam. That other stuff, it’s very good, but every once in awhile one of those stupid things sneaks in. But then I get it.