22 December 2009

Arrrrrrr. -.-

It has been brought to my attention that spammers have recently found a way to post comment spam on Blogger blogs without it notifying me via email. How they're doing it, I have no idea. I just cleaned off a bunch of them from General Comments and Smileys, which they seem to like for some reason. If you see more anywhere, please tell me.

To cut down on this nonsense, I've turned on captchas (which I typically hate with a passion), and all comments on posts over 30 days old now go into moderation. Hopefully that'll help. And hopefully I'll be able to turn off the captchas again at some future date.

7 comments:

Nathan said...

I've been getting daily doses of spam too, but I didn't know it can show up without an email notification. How'd you even find out about them if you didn't get emails?

Janiece said...

MWT, I'd like to know that, too. I really don't want to turn on captcha, but I will if I have to...

Eric said...

That's freaking bizarre. I don't get e-mail notifications (I track new comments via RSS), but I have no idea how they'd get around an e-mail notification.

On the plus side, it's another opportunity to try to spread the "captchanitions" meme! :)

"eximalve": a shucked mollusk.

Megadeus said...

This gave me an idea: you could put some Google Analytics code in your template to better analyze your traffic patterns.

You might be able to figure out who's responsible for the spam.

Whether or not you'll be able to do anything about it, I'm not sure. I don't know if Blogger's backend will allow you to block them by IP or what.

"scidem": scientific diadem, abbr.

MWT said...

Nathan: first I noticed a couple of them on my "I won Nanowrimo" post, and couldn't remember ever getting the email. Then, Steve Buccheit made a comment on Eric's blog that he'd seen the same thing - which meant it wasn't just me having a brain blip.

I've seen some on your blog too (same content), but figured you'd gotten the emails and would remove them... but, maybe not?

Janiece: I wish I knew. Hopefully the Google Blogger people are also aware and will put an end to it sometime soon.

Eric: RSS eh? Hmmmmm. Maybe I should finally get around to figuring out how all that works...

Megadeus: I have statcounter already and can pinpoint their IP addresses if I really wanted to. But they come from all over. Based on my experiences at Scriptlance, the people who actually post the spam are just being paid minimum wage (or less) by someone else. Generally they have a quota to fill, and then someone comes along to check their work before they get paid. So I try to delete their work before the checker comes by. :p

TheHusband said...

MWT - The spam is probably coming by way of trick called redirecting. If you have ever received spam email from yourself to yourself on any email program i.e. yahoo, gmail, a private address... then the same principle applies here.

The spammers "are" notifying you by sending an email from you to you via them (they, as the originator of the spam, spoof your name for their message hence notifying YOU!)

Ahhhhh the internetS what a magical, mystical thing it is!

P.S. Nice meeting you, we're in FL today and on our way to the tropical islands later this afternoon.

MWT said...

I think that I don't like this newfangled redirecting trick much. -.-

Nice meeting you too. Hope you're having a good time on the cruise. :)