Blogspam

Recently I've been getting “comments” on some of my blog entries, from automated spammers. The messages are pretty consistent: “Hi! Great web site!” blah blah blah. Then a bunch of links to websites.

It was pretty easy to kill these, I just rejected any comments that contain http:// and that takes care of it. Prevents legit guests from posting website links as well; c'est l'merde. I could have made it “log on to register” but then I have to deal with the whole login system. Was a lot simpler just to regex comments.

I notice they also have hit several other blogs that I read – often there are more spam messages than there are legit comments. Which is unfortunate, because like email spam, popups, and mailing list spam, it quickly devolves into more noise than signal.

The odd thing to me, is that these spam sites aren't even up when I go to check them. I still get the rejects in my mailbox, so I sometimes look them up. What I've found is that either they've been taken down already, or they never existed. They usually have links like somejunksite.cheaphost.org – and even cheaphost.org isn't even available. Pretty ineffective marketing, even if they worked.

Best thing for you to do? Never, ever click or order anything that came from a spam, no matter how you got it. I imagine it's too late, and there are too many people online that are stupid enough to order viagra or golf clubs or spamming software or antispam software, from spam. So we get more and more of these until the medium becomes unusable. That's not crapping in your own nest – it's crapping in everyone's nest.

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