While setting up this new iteration of the blog I made a decision–all my older entries would again be open for comments. A few years ago faced with a plethora of blog spam comments were shut off after a week or two.
You know what spam is, but blog spam? It’s much more insidious!
Did you create your own blog or did a program do it? Could you please respond? 18 – Leila Caracci
Looks harmless, right? Except Leila’s email address says she’s GailWoolfolk@aol.com. There’s more.
My blog’s comment form allows you to enter a website address. Leila/Gail has attached MLBH0TD0G.TK (I have sanitized the site by substituting zeros). There lies the rub.
If that comment had gotten posted, accompanied by that URL, the named website would get a little rub of my Google glory. It would rank a tiny bit higher in searches. Multiply that by hundreds or thousands of sites and the effect can become enormous.
I would have spotted this on my own, but WordPress comes with Akismet, a filter which performs the job silently and very well.
This blog is great. How did you come up witht he idea? 6 3 4
That’s another one appealing to my ego. Notice the random numbers at the end to try and throw off filtering. It didn’t work.
Great site! Your writing is so fresh compared to most other bloggers. Thanks for writing when you get the chance to, I’ll be sure to keep visiting!
That’s another with a non-matching email/name combo. The linked website soft sells French Press coffee makers with an affiliate link to Amazon. These folks are resourceful.
Any time anyone has something of value others want a piece of it, like my Google karma. What the Internet does is make tiny inconsequential pieces easy to aggregate. I would guess getting many Geoff’s to post your URL produces significant income for little effort!
Since the bog has been up with WordPress (under 24 hours and only now beginning to be seen by Google) I’ve gotten 46 comments. 41 were spam!
As long as Akismet holds its ground I’ll keep everything open. I am only marginally optimistic.
I am not a big fan of bolded sanserif fonts Well, I should say not a fan of most of them). Can’t really quantify why. Maybe its cause I like text to look typewritten, or because fonts like Bookman are “warmer”.
Actually, for my somewhat tired eyes, this is a lot easier to read…
Thanks for pointing this out. I had the exact same comments on my blog and the same name person. I opted not to publish it obviously. It was a nice catch by akismet.