Tag Archives: bad behavior

My, that is a lot of spam…

I have been running a personal blog for many years- arguably since about 1997.  I think I switched to WordPress in 2005 after previously managing with a static HTML page and then a PHPNuke website.  I started getting comment ‘spam’ shortly after I started using WordPress: like email spam, spam comments are irritating messages that aren’t really created by actual people who have something meaningful to say.
NewImageThankfully, the folks at Automattic who make WordPress provided something called Akismet to ‘block’ or filter spam comments.  I activated Akismet, and managing spam became more or less a memory… but the numbers, goodness… the numbers are huge.

Continue reading My, that is a lot of spam…

Stupid spam robots…

You may notice that the “furballs coughed up… #### today alone!” number in the header of this blog seems oddly inflated.  Your observation would be correct: I suspect no more than a couple hundred humans visit this site in a given day.  However, the spam robots visit in vast, unending waves.

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Getting tough on spam users…

I run a simple little blog here.  I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive.  I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments.  The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else.  Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.

Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed.  Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress.  There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs.  Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.

never_underestimate_stupid

Continue reading Getting tough on spam users…