Every blogger eventually gets to the point where he/she begins to get noticed. Unfortunately, I am not talking about the kind of attention bloggers want. I reached this point with my “Indie authors are rude, pushy, completely self-absorbed, and their books suck” post in December of last year, which got a lot of people talking about it. Almost immediately I began getting comments like this one by a character named Coach Factory O:
“Hi, this is my first visit to your blog! Our group of volunteers and start a new initiative in a coHi, this is my first visit to your blog! Our group of volunteers and start a new initiative in a community in the same niche.Your blog provides us with useful information to work on.You have done a good job.”
This was a weird comment that said nothing related to my post and used mangled English. I deleted it but I got more such comments and then they spread to other posts in my blog. I realized it had finally happened. I had attracted the forum spammers!
Forum spammers can be either persons or robots that leave comments on your website. The robots are programs that search the web for relevant blogs and other outlets with comment sections and leave comments at random. The comments sometimes don’t make sense such as the following one by “Tory Burch” which I got in five of my posts in one day:
“detection of data errors or abnormal first notify the relevant technical personnel”
Usually the comments are more coherent and designed to flatter you like the following comment by Technic:
“It constantly shocks me exactly how blog web page entrepreneurs for example your self can discover a while plus the commitment to bring on creating exceptional articles. Your website is amazing and one of my own ought to study blogs. I basically want to say thanks.”
And some are even funny, like this one by Corset Wholesal:
“Great information, First of all many thanks to the author who wrote this article. It is incomprehensible to me now, but in general, the usefulness and significance is overwhelming. Thanks again and good luck!”
It looks like these comments were translated into English from another language with one of those web translators.
Forum spammers can have two purposes. The first is that by leaving a post on website “A” with a link to website “B” the spammer artificially increases the number of websites that link to website “B” and thus increases the visibility of website “B” for search engines (search engine optimization: SEO). It is a way to make a website more noticeable. The second purpose is that sometimes the link in the comment leads to a phishing site with the intent of identity theft.
The spammer problem not only turned into a bit of a nuisance for me, but also it is a bit depressing to get back to my blog and learn that my readers left ten comments only to find out that all of them are spam. I have now switched to comment moderation. This means I have to approve every comment before it appears on my site. Unfortunately this destroys any chance of back and forth discussion among my readers.
There are tens of thousands of spammers both robot and human roaming the web nowadays. The programmers of the robot spammers are locked in an arms race with anti-virus/spam companies. There are anti-bot programs like those hard to reach CAPTCHA recognition codes that were successful for a while, but a new generation of spambots has arisen that can surmount this barrier.
So far I can recognize the comments left by spammers from their nonsense words, their mangled English, their repetitiveness, or their lack of relation to the particular blog post. But spammers are getting more sophisticated. What happens if I get a single comment like:
“Great post, thanks for sharing!”
The content of this comment is very general; it could make sense within the framework of many posts. Should I accept it or delete it? Sometimes people don’t have the time to write a long post making specific references to the subject matter of the post. I don’t want to shut readers out of my blog, but at the same time I don’t want to approve comments with links to potentially malicious sites.
What do you do?
***
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“Hi, this is my first visit to your blog! Our group of volunteers and start a new initiative in a coHi, this is my first visit to your blog! Our group of volunteers and start a new initiative in a community in the same niche.Your blog provides us with useful information to work on.You have done a good job.”
This was a weird comment that said nothing related to my post and used mangled English. I deleted it but I got more such comments and then they spread to other posts in my blog. I realized it had finally happened. I had attracted the forum spammers!
Forum spammers can be either persons or robots that leave comments on your website. The robots are programs that search the web for relevant blogs and other outlets with comment sections and leave comments at random. The comments sometimes don’t make sense such as the following one by “Tory Burch” which I got in five of my posts in one day:
“detection of data errors or abnormal first notify the relevant technical personnel”
Usually the comments are more coherent and designed to flatter you like the following comment by Technic:
“It constantly shocks me exactly how blog web page entrepreneurs for example your self can discover a while plus the commitment to bring on creating exceptional articles. Your website is amazing and one of my own ought to study blogs. I basically want to say thanks.”
And some are even funny, like this one by Corset Wholesal:
“Great information, First of all many thanks to the author who wrote this article. It is incomprehensible to me now, but in general, the usefulness and significance is overwhelming. Thanks again and good luck!”
It looks like these comments were translated into English from another language with one of those web translators.
Forum spammers can have two purposes. The first is that by leaving a post on website “A” with a link to website “B” the spammer artificially increases the number of websites that link to website “B” and thus increases the visibility of website “B” for search engines (search engine optimization: SEO). It is a way to make a website more noticeable. The second purpose is that sometimes the link in the comment leads to a phishing site with the intent of identity theft.
The spammer problem not only turned into a bit of a nuisance for me, but also it is a bit depressing to get back to my blog and learn that my readers left ten comments only to find out that all of them are spam. I have now switched to comment moderation. This means I have to approve every comment before it appears on my site. Unfortunately this destroys any chance of back and forth discussion among my readers.
There are tens of thousands of spammers both robot and human roaming the web nowadays. The programmers of the robot spammers are locked in an arms race with anti-virus/spam companies. There are anti-bot programs like those hard to reach CAPTCHA recognition codes that were successful for a while, but a new generation of spambots has arisen that can surmount this barrier.
So far I can recognize the comments left by spammers from their nonsense words, their mangled English, their repetitiveness, or their lack of relation to the particular blog post. But spammers are getting more sophisticated. What happens if I get a single comment like:
“Great post, thanks for sharing!”
The content of this comment is very general; it could make sense within the framework of many posts. Should I accept it or delete it? Sometimes people don’t have the time to write a long post making specific references to the subject matter of the post. I don’t want to shut readers out of my blog, but at the same time I don’t want to approve comments with links to potentially malicious sites.
What do you do?
***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.
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