Blogosphere Suffers Spam Explosion

c|net on the increasingly difficult problem of fighting spam on weblogs:

Boing Boing would allow its readers to leave comments and engage in a discussion on the wildly popular blog, if it weren’t for spam.

The piece focuses more on problems bloggers themselves face:

“It is a major hassle,” Frauenfelder said. “It is just getting worse and worse. My fantasies of violent revenge against spammers become more lurid every week.”

than on problems caused for their web hosts, and is a superficial overview in many respects, but it’s good to see some mainstream attention to the problem, which consumes more of my time than I had ever imagined it would.

At this point, I’ve tried every approach under the sun for the Birdhouse bloggers: standard blacklists (a moving target), moderation and authentication (chilling effect on conversation), mod_security blacklists (hard to keep updated, resource intensive), javascript (ultimately hackable), referrer tracking (shuts out commenters behind certain firewalls)…

But I’ve never had it as easy as I have since switching to WordPress and setting up the distributed Akismet system, which has blocked more than 1,000 spams from this blog in the past two weeks without a single false positive, and while requiring very minimal system resources. Sounds like a lot, but some of my users average around one spam/trackback submission attempt per minute, 24×7. You do the math.

Music: The Flaming Lips :: What Is The Light?

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4 Replies to “Blogosphere Suffers Spam Explosion”

  1. Dear sir:

    I am teh royal stenographer of hsi most highness the George Robinson Wilhelven, III. It is with most urgent need that I contact you. The lottery of his majestys will informs us…

  2. Gilbert – Isn’t it wonderful! You can’t even fool it if you try! Now if you had included a known spammy URL, or if other bloggers around the network had marked you as a bad fellow, that would have gone straight into the can. :)

  3. LOL – I was thinking I should have included a spammy URL, but I didn’t want to get blacklisted! :)

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