Jackass Blog Comments

This guy wanted to be seen bad enough, so I may as well feature him

this webmaster doesnt want to help you.....
i have a good website where you may find coupons for google, yahoo, MSN, looksmart, but this webmaster delete my messages all the time....
i wont give up, i will post my messages again and again....

How absurd is it to threaten me with continued spam until I leave it published? That jerk had a new PHPBB driven SEO forum which had one post on it. It offered the opportunity to get Looksmart coupons (affiliate links) after you made 50 posts AND linked at his new forum. He must have spammed my blog about 20 times before I banned his IP address.

Between that clown and some of the other blog comment spam that has been hitting my blogs recently I was becoming quite scared as to the current state of humanity and the concept of evolution. Then I realized I should just laugh at those sort of people and everything was better again.

In spite of having Javascript required to post a comment on this blog, over 90% of the comments fall into at least one of the following categories: pure spam, of no value, unoriginal, point at adult sites or sleazy one page domain lander parking pages or sleazy lead generation / salesletter sites, or have keywords as the anchor text. I wonder if my sometimes infrequent publishing, coarse copy, and political views sometimes prevent some of the better potential commenters from commenting.

I will be the first to admit that I was probably a bit of a blog comment spammer when blogs were new, but considering just how many people are automatically and manually blog spamming right now I thing there is far more value in doing things which make the publisher want to like you and read your thoughts.

Published: July 30, 2006 by Aaron Wall in blogs

Comments

July 30, 2006 - 8:01pm

As much as I love the Internet I do miss the old days (pre 1995) when one could have a good old fashioned face to face "chat" with someone annoying - then kick the $hit out ot them

David

July 30, 2006 - 8:56pm

That was nice of you Aaron, to give the guy what he wants. LOL.

July 30, 2006 - 9:58pm

I agree with what you're saying, but you have to admit that this particular spammer is quite unique; He felt offended by your deletion of his spam posts!

More seriously;
Do you notice a different in comments (spam, nothing to ad or real discussion) on deferent type of posts? (can be different subject, or tone of voice, etc. etc.)

July 30, 2006 - 10:29pm

I have been using the WordPress blog engine (the one you install, not the hosted version) and the Akismet spam blocking plugin catches about 99% of the garbage.
Of course, I don't have the visitor numbers that you do, but I wonder if the MT blog engine offers something similar.
Jonathan Ginsberg

mblair
July 30, 2006 - 11:13pm

Personally, I would have thought that the Godfatheresque "friendly advice" that you give to spammers in your comments form instructions would have sufficed to ward off most manual comment spammers.

But I suppose you still get the type of people that ignore "Beware of Dog" signs and don't mind being bitten in the ass :-)

August 11, 2006 - 11:41am

Well links for PR probably are like currency. If people can print it for free it is useless, so given time the spam comments should regarded as useless by Google and hence stop.

Richard Evans Lee
July 31, 2006 - 12:38pm

Across my sites spam comments are happily at a long time low. The big exception is the ringtones spammers leading me to ban the word.

From your industry I've noticed an increase in offers of SEO services, link exchanges and content writing form letters show up in comments for the last month or two.

Never been bothered by anyone as bafflingly stupid as they quy you quoted.

July 31, 2006 - 1:18pm

Interesting idea - Insult the gatekeeper until he responds with a complete rebuttle blog post.

So to do this I need to do what? Make a library of insults, maybe something like this

http://www.randominsults.net/

and add that to my comment spamming?

-q

P.S. How perfect is it that the link is also an adsense spam page in addition to the random insult? - (not mine, btw).

July 31, 2006 - 3:07pm

I feel your pain Aaron. I get comment spam all the time.

July 31, 2006 - 3:38pm

I had no idea you received that much spam. I don't blame you for not posting every day.

July 31, 2006 - 4:21pm

This summer might be called the summer of SPAM - I have received more spam this summer than at any point I can remember.

Just my 2¢ on spam.

Spam is a huge wast of time and resources. Discussing and talking about SPAM is just like throwing gasoline at a brush fire. It wastes more time and resources.

I try to quickly deal with it and move on. I know that doesn't work for everybody, but...

July 31, 2006 - 6:11pm

When my blog was up for about a month, I was disappointed that I didn't get any comment spam. I assumed that it was indicative of how poor my visibility was.

I then wrote a post crying about how I did not get any comment spam.

Well, that particular post now gets 3x more comment spam than any other post on my site. But at least the spammers are kind enough to include nofollow tags on their links.

- Aaron, I have a hunch that this post will soon become your most spammed post.

John
July 31, 2006 - 6:14pm

Few foods are as versatile as the SPAM Family of Products.

There seems to be no end to the creative and tasty ways you can enjoy SPAM.

See for yourself. Better yet, taste for yourself. You can browse our Recipe Search, read about our National "Best SPAM Recipe" Competition, or order a Recipe Book. Enjoy!

August 1, 2006 - 9:19am

Caught Spam

Akismet has caught 1,516 spam for you since you first installed it.

You have no spam currently in the queue. Must be your lucky day. :)

very lucky indeed. but 1516 instances of spam is nothing to be scoffed at. It drives me insane.

August 1, 2006 - 3:46pm

It is indeed apppalling how much blogs are being spammed. My blog is a new one but one of the first commenters were spammers. Akismet has caught about 100 spam comments in a couple of weeks.

I guess you just have to build a tall wall (spam filter) and enjoy your green garden alone ;)

August 1, 2006 - 11:31pm

>I was becoming quite scared as to the current state of
>humanity and the concept of evolution.

Oh, you didn't know? Evolution was still born.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2004/1106ng.asp

August 2, 2006 - 11:17am

I get annoyed when you see an interesting post with loads of comments, so you think great, must be a good discussion...and then they turn out to all be garbage links to ringtone websites.

Why not moderate?

August 2, 2006 - 11:18am

I get annoyed when you see an interesting post with loads of comments, so you think great, must be a good discussion...and then they turn out to all be garbage links to ringtone websites.

Why not moderate?

August 3, 2006 - 8:33am

Moderating comments is a pain, too, but less of a problem than spam is. My personal blog has little visibility, yet I get daily comment spam.

Some have actually been so well written that I've had to think a moment about whether they are automated (or cut'n'pasted) or not.

August 5, 2006 - 1:39am

Hey Aaron, I heard somewhere that you won't help me with SEO but someone else will help me with finding coupons? Where are the coupons!?

I suppose people think that if they come up with something that doesn't make a remote amount of sense that it just might work. I suppose this time it kind of did?

Saying that the webmaster won't help you on a topic that the site is centered around and has been constantly updated and then offering a COMPLETELY different topic as an ad. I'll have to try that one.

August 7, 2006 - 3:58pm

I think the guy needs to change his approach to get what he wants. It's nice of Aaron to be giving him what he wants, but I don't think it's doing him any good. He may think what he's doing is right and continue using the same approach. Other bloggers may not be so nice...

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