And you thought email spam was bad! Over 80% of your incoming email is spam? And you think that’s bad? Well, consider the recent meteoric rise of blog spam…
Spammers discovered some time ago that they could enter comments (on blog entries that allow comments, that is), and that their comments, of course, could be promoting their Viagra or sex or other type of site completely unrelated to the topic of the blog.
We saw this start happening roughly in June, 2004, and others saw it even earlier. Initially it seems that these comments were inserted by real humans paid to insert them. Recently, however, it seems that the spammers have written programs to seek out blogs that accept comments and insert these spam comments by the dozens. Yesterday (mid-December, 2004) I discovered that one of our blogs was getting around 30 of these each day.
One solution to this is to turn off the ability to comment on blog entries. We’ve done this for one of our blogs which wasn’t getting much activity anyway. Another solution is to turn on comment moderation, which means each submitted comment must be approved by the blog writer. This is an acceptable solution for low-volume blogs with low-volume spamming.
Those using MovableType can follow this discussion at the SixApart web site.
Read up on blog spam: