I just got a message from one of our faculty member’s who got a notice that her Maricopa learning eXchange “package” on Creating a Webliography was blessed with a comment from “Casino Gambling” offering tons of wonderful and exotic URLs for various substances and things I had never heard of.
So into the database I went and quickly rooted out a few more (also FYI, Spammer, I have a filter on you, splfffffffff!). We have been ready to roll in a tool for package owners to have delete control on comments, so now I have a reason to finish that task.
I guess getting a web site spammed is some sort of sick, twisted, form of recognition… that I would rather not waste my time dealing with.
Is there no end? I wasted time again this morning with a spat of Chinese URl wiki spam. Maybe there will be a full time job soon as a Professional De-Spammer.
Someone, someone out there please get the guys at Google to wake up and take responsibility that their formulas for page rank are the prime incentive for Mr Gambling and his Assorted Spam Friends…. and that the result of this are thousands of small time blog site owners and other web site admins wasting time cleaning up the spam.
Take away Google Rank for spammers. Make a Google Blacklist for ’em. Do Something. Please. Please. Please.
Update (1 hour later): 14 more comment spams rolled in. I’ve got a simple blacklist rolling now, but I need to get some better regex matching that what is in place. I have turned off notifications to our faculty. Actually I yanked the whole script for while to generate some 404s for the bastards.
I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, but I actually have some real work to do.
Die Spammers Die!
Have you looked into requiring registration for comments? I know its an inconvenience, but it should be reasonably effective.
I’m lucky that my work blog doesn’t get much comment spam (umm, nobody’s reading me 😉 ) but my personal blog gets a ton. I just discovered pLog which has bayesian filtering for comment spam built in. Since I imagine that most blog spam is the same, it would be easy to create a base training file that could be shared. Perhaps other blogging packages will pick up on it.
http://www.plogworld.org/blog.php/plog_development_journal