Blog spam
One of the stupidest trends I've seen really explode in the last year is blog spam -- that is, automated unsolicited commercial postings made to the comment fields on blogs such as this.
They typically follow a basic format like, "Hey, I agree with you. Nice blog." and then link to some magic penis cream or a promise of low mortgage rates or online casino action. Sometimes I get 20, 30 of these a day. Lately the problem has been worse.
Up until today I was running Movable Type 2.6.x and an older version of MT-Blacklist, an excellent way to clean out your spam once it's there. I've been combatting the problem for a while using MT-Blacklist, but the way it worked before was pretty much a reactive thing that only worked after the fact. MT3 and MT-Blacklist 2 are a lot more tightly integrated, so I'm hoping it'll help. We'll see. If it gets really out of control, I might have to opt for registration or just get rid of comments all together.
Comments
Hmm, I hadn't noticed any here. Or any comments at all on my blog...
Posted by: Alphax | September 16, 2004 05:41 PM
That's partly because I've been trying very hard to keep them out -- all comments are e-mailed to me, so I know as soon as it happens. Also, they generally nail the stuff that's been around for a while, so it's out of view.
Posted by: flargh | September 16, 2004 05:51 PM
Does this affect other blogs like PMachine?
Posted by: Jim Dalrymple | September 16, 2004 05:53 PM
Jim:
AFAIK, it's unspecific to any particular blogging engine; it's just something that happens to sites without any sort of comment/user registration system in place. I find those rather onerous so I've been reluctant to use one.
Posted by: flargh | September 16, 2004 06:11 PM