Your Blog Is Brilliant!!!
They're not of course, but the names they trade on are all solidly Anglo-Saxon.
A heinous wave of comment spam is threatening to annoy Blinq to death. The commenters have names like Mark Clark, Jesse Adams, Evan Smith, Justin Allison, Thomas Anderson, Zachary Davis and Trevor Moore, and their messages begin with a bald play for our attentions:
"Cool Site!" Or "I enjoyed reading..." or "I really am impressed by ... " You get the picture. They play to our weakness: praise.
How come there are no messages from Heshie Rodriguez?
The commentbots supply an email address and a Web site in the proper spaces, and in the middle of their missive drop the name of what their point really is: some obscure url.
For instance, at the risk of giving attention to one of the sites, here is a recent one. As usual, it came in response to a post from months ago - the better that we wouldn't notice, I guess.
Very interesting. keep the good work! The only thing you take with you: http://www.aphids.com/cgi-bin/quotes.pl?act=ShowListingsForSub, <a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Albert_Einstein">which differ from the prejudices</a>
The site is a quotations archive. Innocent enough. We assume we have not just been duped into posting something that launches NORAD. I choose the subject: "Success," and summon James Joyce, who once wrote or said, "Mistakes are the portals of discovery." Sadly the site offers no quotations on spam.
I assume these annoyances are all sent our by programs, and aim for untended spaces. Presumably Web sites pay to have these people litter their names across the Web. It's a pain in the butt to me.
Typepad, my blog software program, is useless here, telling me they have no ability to screen comment spam by forcing commenters to type in random characters as some programs do. I don't want to approve comments before they're published because that slows down your ability to respond to something you're read.
So I'm stuck with the commercial come-ons of Taylor Dickinson.
Anybody have any ideas?
It seems odd to me that Typepad wouldn't be able to deal with this. Movable Type 3.2, the do it yourself software from the people that wrote Typepad, seems to be handling this fine. Of course, humble Aarrgghh!! isn't as big a target as Blinq so maybe I'm just not being hit with as much.
I hate filling in those random characters. It's definitely a comment deterrent. One way would be to have a link next to each comment that readers can click on to report spam. when enough clicks are registered, the comment is automatically disabled or deleted. another way would be to audit comments before they are made live, but i know there's no way in h@#%@ that would ever be a viable option. that's as useful as going through and deleting spam on live posts, except more work since you have more legit comments than illegit ones. Of course, I don't use typepad so that's about as much help as I can be... none :) ----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: albert
as a typepad user and spam recipient - i even recently got a 409 comment - i can say that typepad help's advice to me was to manually approve each comment. what kind of a solution is that? stupid. i'm sorry that i signed on for another year of typepad. stupid me.
I did briefly see a random character display appear this past weekend while I loaded a page of my blog. I'm thinking they've been playing with it. And playing with it seems most appropriate. I don't see anyone saying anything about it, but it appears to me that TypePad is rejecting third-party TrackBack pings. The HaloScan and Wizbang Form submissions. They say it's a 'bug' they are 'working on' but it's been four days.
We use wordpress at maddkarma and a plugin called "bad behavior" that effectively does the job. There's also an add-on that tracks statistics of failed attempts to post this insidious type of spam
Funny, because I've had problems commenting here because Typepad seems to think I'm comment spam. But the real stuff gets through. I was getting e-mail spam from Jews recently. All the "senders" were names like Goldberg, Cohen, Aaronson, Friedberg. Just one name. The last one I got was from "Freud," asking me "Do you really want to expose your intimate life?" I dunno, doctor... Then the WASPS invaded. Sheesh.
You must be reading my mail, Ed. I can't figure out why Typepad thinks you're a spammer. either. This time worked, though. So tell, do you get German spam, being in Berlin and all that?