Sep 23, 2004 Nomadig:
Milestones
I have now reached two milestones (one good and one bad) with my blog:
- The ShortStat shows more than 10,000 hits
- The first comment spam arrived.
Both milestones show that I’m getting traffic and Nomadig.com is reachable from many different locations.
I don’t understand the moral of the spammers. How dare you ride free with my blog that I have cultivated with my energy and vision? I do understand their motives: money. Maybe people are clicking enough those links and somebody gets some revenue.
The same thing goes with the ShortStat statistics; a lot of referrals are from paysites, some generated by robots and some with spyware tools.
Everybody visiting this site, do me (and the community) a favour and check your computer for spyware:
- Download Ad-Aware from www.lavasoftusa.com, run it and remove all spyware.
- Download also Spybot – Search & Destroy from www.spybot.info, run it and remove rest of the spyware.
- Consider switching to Firefox or Mozilla for getting rid of the problems for real.
1. Matthew Pennell — Friday, Sep 24 2004
I had 30 new spam comments this morning – adding a comment blacklist has moved several places up my To Do list.
2. Janne — Friday, Sep 24 2004
In WordPress, you can turn a wordlist filtering only with a couple clicks. Very nice.
Anyhow, I was pondering on the problem while riding my bike to work today and got to conclusion that something should be done in a shared level, as otherwise all bloggers are fighting alone and the spammers will have upperhand.
Maybe somebody would be interested in building a server that could validate comments against spamming and inform whether the comment can be automatically released to public or held for review?
As a remark, my spam was related to online poker. I read today from Kauppalehti (Finland’s biggest financial newspaper) that online poker has gained a lot of players and they are big sums of money going through the sites. For example, a Canadian company estimates that over 100 million British pounds are exchanged in the virtual poker tables every day. Ladbrokes is hosting the biggest site in Europe, and several million pounds go through it daily.
Industry estimates that the value of the online poker business in 15 billion GBP. Not bad, if the business is not advertised through spamming.
3. Stuart — Saturday, Sep 25 2004
I had a couple of spammers when I was using WP but was able to block them. As you say WP has a good blocking system. Since I moved to TXP I haven’t had any yet though I think it’s more by luck than judgement. I did spot through Shortstat that I was getting a regular referral from a porn site. It was always under a different name but always connected back to the same site and had the same IP so I’ve now blocked it completely from The Bomb Site via my hosts Website Administration application.
4. Janne — Thursday, Oct 7 2004
I got a load of new spam today from the same guy as before – it got past of my simple filter. Fortunately, I could delete all of them on a single screen. Seems that WP is quite advanced on this front… Maybe some developer has had similar issues.
I strengthened the rules, but I doubt that they would hold for the next flood. Something better should be figured out… Hopefully somebody does it before I have to do it :)