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blogs, Comment Spam, comments, E-mail, E-mail spam, junk e-mail, People, preventing spammers, recognizing spam, SPAM, spammers, WordPress
So while slopping yogurt over my burnt tongue, I hear it’s the best thing for that by the way, my mind started to wander and it hit me. Didn’t you start a blog a while back? When was the last time you posted on that thing? Gah! My whole Olympic Memories series is messed up now. Especially since the Olympics is NOW over! Four years can’t pass fast enough!
I remembered you often Critics May Lie and I even had a few ideas to post. Unfortunately it couldn’t be helped. I’ve been busy business wise and some things just had to take priority over others, for then anyway. Now that things are set in gear I can take some time to think beyond developing strategies to take over the world.
Anyway.
I probably wouldn’t have burnt my tongue if I hadn’t taken a moment to halt my break neck pace and relax with a movie, a new book and a bess Trini egg, sausage and cheese melt (I believe it’s called an omelet, :-D), but then, I probably wouldn’t have remembered the blog either.
So here I am again, a month later (shame) to see what I’ve missed and whose comments I didn’t acknowledge, only to find on logging in that except for the new blogs on the WordPress ‘Freshly Pressed’ page, nothing has really changed and the bloggers world has gone on and kept turning just fine without me.
So I decided to clear my spam and while cursing my narrow bandwidth for the comments tab taking so long to load to my surprise I found that my spam had crossed into the 100’s!! What the….? I was expecting at least 20!!! Okay, I guess something has changed.
Dare I scan through every single one or just delete them all?
Now, spam is tricky because there just may not be ONE good comment in the bunch and if you’ve ever had spam in your comments box you know that most of the time it has it’s own weird rules of probability. The more spam you get can actually decrease the relevance of each comment exponentially, not increase it, AT ALL, but I guess that’s one of the reasons why it’s called SPAM, right? So the odds of me getting a relevant comment in the bunch had actually slimmed drastically from the 2 or 3 spam that I normally got checking my blog everyday.
And if you could see the immensity of irrelevant comments!! I actually had a good chuckle going through them. So let’s have a lesson on how to pick up Spam, because it seems as if ALL I EVER get is Spam!
There were the obvious ones, and yes, these were ALL spam so I did not include any of the links.
FROM baccarat: BaccaratPower the conception of baccaratcasino game learn how to win baccarat. learn baccarat system to improve your winning rate. Dont forget to visit ‘said website‘.
That one doesn’t even attempt to comment on the article or any article. It’s just an advertisement. SPAM!
FROM personal injury lawyers: Some people have done over which from a morning!Then you definately can certainly add different assistance matters, produce backlinks, assistance home windows, place graphical records and anything the particular HTML CODE Support method lets you do; accomplishing this connected with doing the job is in fact as easy as using the services of Microsoft Workplace uses.* Place: Because identify suggests, the space message is effective through outer place.
That one would give my former English teachers nightmares. Some kinda code… I don’t know. SPAM!
And then there were others that had very little or no funny english, were good comments but just made no sense when compared with the post it was made under. Like this one:
FROM Liane Buchinski: Its like you read my mind! You appear to know so much about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you can do with a few pics to drive the message home a bit, but instead of that, this is wonderful blog. An excellent read. I will certainly be back.
What? The post this was under had a ton of pictures in it! I actually left some pictures out because even I taught it was a little too much. SPAM! Please note, spammers don’t really read your blog. It’s probably not even a person, just an automated Spam-bot posting on random sites.
And then there were the ones that try to give something back with a friendly quote or two or thanks for helping with something. Exactly what, I don’t know.
FROM buy followers: Appreciate it for all your efforts that you have put in this. Very interesting information. “He hasn’t an enemy in the world – but all his friends hate him.” by Eddie Cantor.
FROM Andrew Pelt: I’ve recently started a site, the information you offer on this site has helped me greatly. Thank you for all of your time & work.
Thanks Andrew but how exactly did my post on Dancing With the Stars help you with your website on the long term benefits of science experiments for children???
You see, in some cases like this, you can very well approve the comment, it won’t hurt really. Or will it? Approving a comment opens the door to more comments by the same user. Once one comment is approved any other comments from that user will not be left in your Spam folder for approval but approved automatically therefore it’s always nice to be sure.
So how can you be more sure of the difference between a spammer and a real comment? If it’s a registered user on the site you’re blogging with, you can safely assume it is not spam. These people normally have an active blog too and information you can view on them. The only problem here would be if you actually disliked the persons comments.
If it’s not a registered user and they left a website, go ahead and visit it. Hovering the mouse over the link normally creates a preview in WordPress that you can glimpse first before you actually go to the link. This is good just in case it’s a porn site under the disguise of a ‘growing community programme’. (rolls eyes) Yeah, I got those too. Pah-leez!!!
If the link doesn’t preview anything or is blank with an error or lock symbol, treat it as SPAM! Once the site has a proper preview and you go on it look for things a real or reputable website or blog should have, e.g. an About section, a Contact Us sheet with actual contact information.
Good examples:
Most spammers don’t have this information on their site or anything that leads to credibility to let you know that a REAL person actually lives there! The point for them is to get as many hits as possible from you and the people who view your page, not to waste their resources on creating actual content beyond advertisements.
In order to get you to their page, many of them even try to play on your ego. Like this wonderful comment:
FROM sennik zabawa: I just wanted to send a quick remark so as to thank you for all the amazing pointers you are placing on this site. My time intensive internet look up has at the end of the day been honored with sensible information to talk about with my visitors. I ‘d repeat that most of us website visitors actually are really endowed to be in a fabulous community with many outstanding professionals with interesting hints. I feel really grateful to have come across your weblog and look forward to some more pleasurable times reading here. Thanks a lot again for a lot of things.
Makes all your writing feel worth while, right? Keep the fuzzy feeling, delete the comment. Why not, you say? Who wouldn’t want more comments like these? As I said before check the site for credibility first. That comment above led to a German site selling cloud storage. Comments from these kinds of sites do not belong on your blog and believe me they won’t be telling you how great you are forever. Especially since they probably can’t even read your blog anyway as most of these comments come from foreign sites, hence the funny English. Once approved it will be plain out adverts and given the huge amount of spam that can come in at a time, approving a spammer can load up your comment stream with so much junk you run the risk of it being a turn off to your real readers. If you actually have any, 😦 sniff.
Once you are satisfied that it looks like a real site with real content, go ahead and approve the comment. With WordPress you can always un-approve the user in the future if they turn out to be a spammer but as I said it’s better to avoid any instances of being over-run with spam for the sake of your blog’s credibility.
So, what did I learn from my little spammer jamboree? (How many times have I said ‘spam’ in this post?! Phew!)
1. Blog more often! It helps you keep better track of the spam. 100 irrelevant comments is a lot to go through to find that real, plausible one. I couldn’t take to go through them all, my head is still spinning. After the first 30, I just deleted the rest. If there were any, I apologise to the one real user who commented in the bunch.
And 2. No matter how famished you are do not eat scolding hot food. If it’s too hot for your fingers it WILL be murder for your gentle taste receptors.
Noted.
Here’s also a helpful link on guarding your e-mail addresses from Spam-bots.
– Written by True Nicks
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