Sunday, March 24, 2013

Dammit...

I turned off word verification some time back because Blogger's spam filter was pretty good at not letting dreck through.

I don't mind cleaning a hundred-and-some-odd spam comments out of the filter every morning and a few dozen more over the course of the day; it's all part of running a blog.

But some sonofabitch in Riga or Shanghai has figured out how to squeak 'em past the filter with appalling regularity in the last week or so, and I'm increasingly waking up to find my readers being pestered in comments by Lithuanian spambots doing SEO for third-world Louis Vuitton knockoffs and sex toy manufacturers, or being asked to "Come Read My Blog: www.virus_laden.phishing.scam.pics_of_my_grandkids.com."

If they don't get their algorithms updated in the next couple days, I'm going to have to turn the CAPTCHA back on, and that makes me sad.
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15 comments:

billy.harvey said...

I'm increasingly waking up to find my readers being pestered in comments by Lithuanian spambots doing SEO for third-world Louis Vuitton knockoffs and sex toy manufacturers...

In the dog-eat-dog world of illicit internet marketing, there's a growing realization that "if you can sell to Tam, you can sell to anyone".

12:48 PM, March 24, 2013
Bob said...

Just shut off anonymous commenting. Works wonders.

12:55 PM, March 24, 2013
Unknown said...

Or scammy messages like the one above, that just quote you and have a link back to their own site.

I long ago set my blogs to moderate all. It's a bit more work for the real comments, but completely eliminates the spammy stuff from appearing (unless you make a mistake in the approval process).

Getting rid of anonymous helps a bit, but won't really get rid of most of it; they'll just openID back to their spam site.

1:00 PM, March 24, 2013
Jay G said...

I gave up and turned CAPTCHA back on. I have a few loyal "anonymous" commenters that I didn't want to alienate.

And I've had enough comments eaten on Discus that I wasn't going there...

1:21 PM, March 24, 2013
Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

I'll immediately grasp your rss

Sorry, but I misread that and just about fell of my chair laughing. :)

2:29 PM, March 24, 2013
New Jovian Thunderbolt said...

Cripes, I just want a checkbox that lets me block/moderate every comment that has an IP range outside CONUS. Is that so hard, Blogger?

2:50 PM, March 24, 2013
BobG said...

With all the "boner pill" ads in the spam, I get this mental picture of gigantic warehouses of them (like the one in the Indiana Jones movies) full of all those pills gathering dust, and people frantically trying to sell them.

3:40 PM, March 24, 2013
Buzz said...

Easy there, Jovi, some of us travel regularly and Tam's snark keeps us connected to home.

4:34 PM, March 24, 2013
Drang said...

@Buzz: That would be the "moderate" part of "block/moderate".

6:25 PM, March 24, 2013
Aesop said...

Oh, great. So now instead of one-stop shopping, I'll have to get my Shanghai sex toys by going straight to the source?
Where's the fun in that?

9:40 PM, March 24, 2013
J.R.Shirley said...

I wonder if there's more or less spam in the comments about spam?

My problem with the Capcha like the one I see below is that at least some of the damn scramble is almost always illegible, taking me 2 or 3 tries before I nail it. If I'm lucky.

7:28 AM, March 25, 2013
Tam said...

John,

"I wonder if there's more or less spam in the comments about spam?"

No difference.

I hate the CAPTCHA too, and it sometimes takes me three or four tries as well, but the alternative is leaving my readers open to virus-laden links until I can get to a keyboard and remove them.

For my sins, this blog gets a decent amount of traffic, and that traffic draws spammers like flies. If it was a dozen or fifty spam comments a day, I'd deal with it. I could even deal with the hundreds and hundreds I get as long as the spam filter caught them; I don't mind manually combing through them for comments by real people that got caught by an overzealous filter.

But their filter broke, and this is the result.

I'm looking at moving the blog, but the minute this stops being fun and turns into work, I stop doing it. (I'm still using the same blog with the same template as I was using in '05; I'm that lazy.)

8:33 AM, March 25, 2013
Trent said...

I cannot tell you how badly I wanted to see the first comment on this post to be some weird spambot post :-)

10:57 AM, March 25, 2013
Anonymous said...

Riga is the capital of Latvia. Lithuanian spambots would be writing from Vilnius. Latvian spammers are the ones trying to marry off their beautiful country bumpkin cousin to you rich (socially inept) Americans (who have previously purchased knock off Louis Vuiton sex toys).

4:06 PM, March 25, 2013
Tam said...

"Riga is the capital of Latvia."

I know, right? And neither is Shanghai! It's almost like those were two different clauses separated by a comma or something!

Sincerely,
A (Socially Inept) American (Who has never bought any Louis, swap-meet or otherwise.)

5:37 PM, March 25, 2013

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