How To Tell A Post Is Spam
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 5, 2010
You know, I wouldn’t think that most people couldn’t identify spam when they see it. However, I’ve been to enough blogs and seen enough spam even on those blogs where people seem to usually monitor what’s going on in their comments area.
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Heck, I know spam is getting pretty sneaky. Sometimes it’s hard to tell a good comment from a spam comment. If you’re not paying attention a new spam comment will show up on an old post, which is why I recently talked about making some posts private.
Still, you must be vigilant in fighting the great spam battle. If you don’t, not only will the spammers win, but those savvy visitors of yours that see you can’t tell spam from the real thing might decide to stay away. So, let’s see if I can help you out in some fashion.
1. Watch out for insulting spam. There are obviously trolls whose job, so they feel, is to make everyone else’s life miserable. Insulting spam is usually pretty easy to determine, though; it’s never on topic.
2. Watch for spam that’s not on topic. Maybe I should have started with this one, but I’m bringing it up now. There is spam that looks pretty good and you might miss it because you don’t read to the end. If a comment starts out intentionally evasive, it’s probably going to continue being so, or else it will introduce something that makes no sense whatsoever.
3. Set your spam filter to move a comment with even one link in it to your spam folder. Sure, every once in awhile you’re going to get a legitimate post in there, but what I’ve seen most often is someone following up a post with a link in it with a second post saying “hey, my post didn’t show up”, or something to that effect. I hope everyone checks their spam folders.
4. One line comments. Unless you know the person, you should probably just delete all of these anyway. Keeping something that says “nice post” is an insult to your blog, and is most probably spam.
5. Check out the email addresses. Most people aren’t using Hotmail anymore, but even if they are, if the name before “@” doesn’t make sense it’s probably spam. If the name you’re given is of one sex but the name in the email address is of another sex, it’s probably spam.
6. It used to be that spam didn’t come with images, but now it does. Make sure you read the comment instead of relying on the fact that there’s now a gravatar attached.
7. Now spam can come in your name. That used to be an easy tell as well, but some of the more sophisticated spam can read who the author of the post is and add it to their comment.
8. If the comment is written to the “webmaster”, it’s spam. Who really uses the term “webmaster” anymore anyway?
9. If the post is in another language and you’ve only ever written in one language, it’s most probably spam. Back in the day I used to copy some of those messages into translation websites to see if it was saying anything pertinent; just scrap it and move on.
10. Finally, if you’re not sure, even with these tips, you can always test the waters by sending an email to the email address. Write a short post saying something like “just seeing if this email is valid before I allow the comment on my blog.” If you get a rejection back, or heck, if you get nothing back, consider it spam and kill it. Even if it’s not really spam, if the person on the other end doesn’t respond, then they probably had no intentions of coming back to your blog, in which case you didn’t need their comment anyway.
I hope that helps. Of course, if you have Askimet on your blog it will help even more.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Making Posts Private
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on May 29, 2010
Last August I wrote a post asking people if they turned comments off on their blog, and overall it seemed many people hadn’t thought about it, though our friend Rummuser does after 60 days. At the time, I couldn’t ever think of a reason why I might do it, then another commenter, Doug, mentioned possibly doing it with posts that have a short message and wouldn’t need to be used again.
I started thinking about this again last week when I noticed some of the posts that spam seemed to be attracted to that was slipping through Askimet. The messages were going to those posts that were either put up announcing something specific and now the moment was gone, such as a webinar, or posts where the period for a comment wouldn’t make sense anymore, such as when I was writing commentary on WordPress 2.6.2, and here we are at WordPress 2.9.2.
Initially I thought about just going back through most of my 700 posts and eliminating the ability for those posts to get comments, then I started thinking about it a little bit more as I was looking at some of those posts. I realized that some of them not only didn’t need comments, but they really didn’t need to be seen by anyone anymore either. Once again, if I had a quick post about something, such as when I posted a quick post years ago when I launched my website marketing book (which is sitting up there at the top left, if you haven’t checked it out yet) reminding people that the launch date was fast approaching, why would I need to let it sit out there. It’s not going to help in SEO purposes, and I can’t figure out why anyone would need to see that particular page again.
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I started thinking about making some of those old posts private. What privacy does is eliminates it from the general public, yet allows you to keep it within instead of just deleting it. That way, you still have your consistent count of posts, you can still go back and track demographics if you want to see what your traffic looked like during a certain time period, and who knows, you just might want to look at it again some day to see where you either went wrong or right on something.
To make a post private in WordPress, all you have to do is be in the editing part of the post, click on the Edit link next to Visibility, and select Private, which is at the bottom. Hit OK, hit Update, and you’re good to go.
Does it hurt or help SEO? Some people might say that removing those posts will hurt your SEO because you’re removing things that help you promote your branding. Some people will say that removing those posts will help because they were pretty much throwaway posts to begin with, which means search engines will penalize you for them anyway and thus it’s best to get rid of them.
I have no real clue; personally, I don’t care. What I do know is that it will eliminate the spam for those particular posts, just as eliminating comments will do, and I pretty much don’t have to bother with them anymore since, when I go back through posts, I’ll be alerted which ones I’ve made private.
By the way, based on the other thing I said about stopping comments, I might as well tell you how to do that also, in case you’re thinking about it. That would be near the bottom of the Edit area, possibly at the very bottom depending on your theme, and all you have to do is uncheck the box next to Allow Comments, then hit Update and you’re done.
It’s going to be a long process going back through over 700 posts, but I figure I’ll get it done in small chunks.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
Russian Spam Heavy Again
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Oct 21, 2009
Last August, I started noticing that I was getting a lot of Russian spam all of a sudden. I have no idea why, but at that time I had someone register to post on this blog with a Russian email address, which I immediately killed. After about a week, it stopped, and things were quiet for a long time.
In the last two weeks, it’s popping up again, a lot of it, on all 3 of my blogs. It seems like the oddest thing, but there you go. I still can’t figure out what these people think they’re getting out of spam. When I wrote my post on hating spam, I listed a statistic showing how there might be a possibility of some of these guys making upwards of $9,000 a day by sending all that spam out, then followed up less than a week later with another post on an article that showed that some of these spammers were probably getting less than 30 clicks a day, making almost no money at all, even with the volume of email going out.
Of course, we all know that, in general, many of these spammers are only looking for the links on blogs where the bloggers don’t care about their blogs anymore. That’s why I wish someone would pay me to go around the internet and kill all dead blogs, so these spammers won’t get what they’re hoping for.
Oh well; I’ll keep dealing with it, and hoping that it ends pretty soon. Glad I have that Askimet protection.
Is It Easy To Comment On Your Blog?
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 29, 2008
I just left a post on another blog. The blog required me to register first, then it sent me a password so I could fully register and add any pertinent information I wished to. It’s a WordPress blog, so I’m familiar with it.
Thing is, the blog has been in existence for almost 18 months, and there’s never been a comment. I would pretty much figure it’s because the blog owner makes one have to register first. I usually don’t register for blogs, but in this case I made an exception. I don’t usually like doing it for three reasons. One, it takes time away from my commenting; when I want to comment, I want to comment now, while I’m thinking about it. Two, it gives the blog owner a feeling that they can start sending me all sorts of email that I don’t want or need; I’ll visit the blog and possibly read or buy stuff when I want to. And three, you can’t unregister; I tried on this one blog and finally just fudged an email address, because the writer was inundating me needlessly with updates, then updates on the updates; enough already.
There are other blogs I’ve left messages on, only to receive an email asking me to click on it to prove that it’s me. It’s easy enough to do, but it leaves me wondering if I want to continue dealing with it long term; I’d rather you just read the comment and determine if you want it on your site or not. A couple of times my entry has never shown up on one of those sites anyway, which left me feeling like I wasted my time. And, if I feel like I’m wasting my time, you’re probably not going to get any love back in the form of links or even being added to the blogroll some day.
I never had it set up that people needed to register for my site (though some do anyway), but I realized fairly early on that I was going to have to add something to stop as much spam as was coming through. I first loaded Botcheck, which took care of a lot of stuff but not nearly enough. I then loaded Bad Behavior, but the same was occurring. Finally I added Askimet, which is supreme, and it catches virtually everything. On my business blog, I added a plugin that makes people put in a randomly generated number. I haven’t had to go that far with this one, as Askimet seems to be doing a great job on its own.
The main idea of your blog is to encourage others to comment; at least that’s usually the intention. You share your ideas, and you hope others will either validate your thoughts or offer something new. If you’re just writing for yourself, then that’s something entirely different; enjoy that. Some folks don’t have comments open at all; their choice. But if you’re going to do it, make it easy.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
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