Spanky's Place :: Comment Spam

« Notes Client Active Workspace Prototype Available | Main| Governmentium »

Comment Spam

I've started getting an inordinate amount of comment spam (100's per day). The spam filter stuff is operational, but I'm still seeing a whole lot coming through. Most of it has been showing up on older postings. so I've configured the blog to disallow new comments on any blog post over 60 days old. I'm not sure if the spam is from bots or actual humans, but I've had enough.

All new comments are now moderated. This will lead to some delay before your comment gets posted (especially when I'm travelling or at a customer site). I have additionally enabled some special logging code; which may cause a slight drop in responsiveness on the site.

Posted by Devin Olson On 10/10/2008 | Permalink

Comments

1 - Devin, I have seen an increase in the past couple of months too but after blocking a couple of IP address ranges I got the problem solved.
Have you checked where it's coming from?

Posted by Vitor Pereira At 09:33:00 AM On 10/10/2008 | - Website - |

2 -

I haven't had the chance to do an analysis on the source(s) yet -I'm on the road and extremely busy right now.

Once I get back to the office, I'll be able to really look into this PIA and see if I can figure it out.

If it turns out that most of the spam is coming from a specific IP address (or range), you can bet I'll be posting that here.

Thanks

Posted by Devin Olson At 10:07:25 AM On 10/10/2008 | - Website - |

3 - Its an inherent weakness in the form submit design. Most of it is bots that are looking to put seemingly random names into fields and urls into text areas then click a submit type input tag.

The names are often not unique, but are later searched on so the bot can register which sites were open enough that the submitted content is exposed to the web.

Often the URL's are links to ad revenue traps. They actually are more hoping to get crawlers to follow the link and thus generate a page view on the target site which is full of ads.

I get these on my request for contact forms via the web site, but never on the blog due to the way the design works.

Posted by Andrew Pollack At 11:56:50 AM On 10/10/2008 | - Website - |