I HATE the S.O.B.s out there that use personal/corporate blogs as targets for spam.
I would like to argue that the “spammers” should be prosecuted like “hackers” The offense of “comment spamming” be no different then any other hacking offense. What really is the difference between a moron that breaks into a network and changes some corporate homepage, adding some porn or other offensive material, and a moron that adds porn, drug, gambling links, etc to a blog via comments? They both are acts of defacing personal/corporate property. I don’t know the proper legal terms to make this post anything other then a “rant”, but I think I have a valid point.
Why am I writing this now? Well, I got a ton of spam over the weekend. During the “despam” process I got a little overzealous with what I was adding to MT-Blacklist as spam and ended up deleting some “good” comments. So now I’m even more pissed about the spam.
Let me end with an apology to the few people that left comments the last couple days, including myself, that now don’t see their comments. Sorry. It sucks. I appreciate your comments and I’ll be more careful the next time I use MT-Blacklist.
I’ve seen a dramatic increase in comment SPAM too. I used to think that would mark the day my blog “made it”. Now I see that it’s just another annoyance in the world of the internet. Next up… RSS SPAM. When that happens, I’m shutting it all down.
What I really hate is that the business of “spam” must certainly be a profitable one. I say that because the technology they use keeps getting better, faster, and smarter. Damn them and the people that make the business of “spamming” a profitable one. If you take the money making ability out of spamming I think you can start to make it go away….
Erik
Every now and again I find comments left on my site that are clearly not real and are lame attempts at spamming my blog. Thankfully I only need to hit the back end of my db to both delete and ban the IP used to spam my site.
Given how my site’s comments work, no one, unless they actually looked at them can see the spam because my comments collapse. I make a point to never say a word when it happens or when I clean it up. No sense in having vistors even look at them. For me, I take pride and believing that I removed every entry before anyone could see a single one.
If I’m right then I just cost that person money. 😉
Hi Eric,
I have seen a blogger hack for stopping spam. Its very simple. When they click on the submit button a javascript box comes up and asks ‘do you really want to submit this?’ This seems to be a good hack to stop spamming. I have not tried it yet, i use the captcha module http://james.seng.sg/archives/cat_drupal_4_bloggers.html which is great.
And why don’t make the je22sig blog a community blog by using either wordpress, drupal or scoop kind of collaborative softwares instead of MT. I left a message about the same here.