Comment Spam
July 14, 2009 by MInTheGap
Filed under Articles, Website Announcement
Visited 1122 times, 1 so far today
Spammers are pretty inventive people. You can run multiple types of spam protection, and still have spam show up.
Recently on this blog we have been getting spam of a different type, and I want to make you aware of the spam and what steps we’ve taken in case we’ve inadvertently deleted a legitimate comment.
Within the past two days, we’ve seen an uptick of blog comments using names of regular commenters on this blog, but not using the same e-mail address or website URL that was used in the past. In some circumstances, the comment has been out of context, but some have looked legitimate.
If you have commented here in the past couple of days and do not see your comment posted, let me know via a comment here or using the comment form.
As a rule of thumb, if a comment appears to be from a regular commenter but has an e-mail address we do not recognize or links to a suspect site we will consider it spam unless you tell us otherwise.
I’m sorry for this post and announcement, and I hope legitimate comments have not been deleted or can be replaced.
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The reason this is happening is to take advantage of a loophole with the “top commenters” plug in. Often the comments will be relevant and respectful, but use someone else’s name. You can definitely delete them or if you find they are respectful just change the name of the commenter to “anon”.
.-= Chris Thompson´s last blog ..Total Transformation Program – Review of Lesson 7 =-.
That was part of what I suspected to be happening– and yet some of the comments were fine. I deleted them this time, maybe I’ll take your advice in the future– don’t know if I’ll keep the links or not, though.
Yeah it’s from this site:
http://www.thelazymarketer.com/blog/2009/07/09/video-check-out-the-authority-loophole-in-action-this-rocks/#comment-3537
Amazing. And they talk about how ethical it is. *Shakes Head*
I think that it would be fine if people came and made relevant respectful comments using their own name and became a top commenter on their own, by adding value … then they would get the link benefit they wanted without making anyone angry.
I agree with you. Mine are all by me, I’m pretty sure.
Actually, you’re name was used in some of the comments– hence why I wanted people to make sure that I didn’t delete something that was supposed to be there.
I don’t think I was angry as much as I thought that people were pretending to be someone they were not. The comments were decent– and I should have done the “anonymous” thing or something. Impersonation doesn’t feel like a ethical thing to do.
I am aware of the course mentioned by Elle on July 15th and I am guilty of trying the technique. But I soon fell out of favor with it, as the technique was very short lived.
The software used to apply this method has another function that finds blogs with very few “Top Commenters” That has led me to read the posts, make a few relevant comments myself and even come back to post more comments. Definitely a win-win for all concerned.
MinTheGap, i agree with you it was not an angry statement. i think peoples ethics are skewed to begin with. keep your stance.
.-= anne´s last blog ..herschelengland4 added an RSS feed to their profile =-.