Tag Archives: spam

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.

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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

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Apparently my Gallery had NSFW comments..

Google sent me an email the other day telling me that my site had “inappropriate” content:

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content.

Adult? Mature? On *my* site? Hmmm, this required some further investigation. It didn’t take long to find the problem- Google even gave me a sample URL. Apparently, sometime in the last few weeks some comment spammer bot found my photo gallery and started spewing link-farm comments in random spots throughout. And of course, the only person who has to do more work in this process is me.

Continue reading Apparently my Gallery had NSFW comments..