First up, here are two new(ish) blogs which have been consistently excellent since I started reading them:- Neurobonkers (see e.g. this post)
- Psych Gripe (e.g. this post)
It's rubbish.
It seems to think that any comment containing more than one hyperlink is spam. Actually, all the spam I get contains one link, and hence makes it through, while the real comments with multiple links, which are usually interesting and sensible, get blocked. A Mr. "Generic Viagra" (no really) can leave 20 comments in 5 minutes with impunity, but more than one link, and you're out.
I would love to turn it off, but you can't. Thanks Google. My comment policy is, as it's always been, that all comments except spam are welcome. So if your comment hasn't appeared, it's not that I've deleted it, it's the spam filter.
I check the spam folder as often as I can, and allow the proper comments through, but you might want to avoid comments with more than one link. Maybe split them into multiple comments. It's not ideal but, as I said, it's not my filter.
9 comments:
Thanks for the kind words :-)
I only just got around to installing spam protection on my blog last week (before which I was plagued by spam) It's very effective but I'm now experiencing a wave of human spammers. These seem to be real people who actually read the article and make a comment. If you look at the last few comments on the post of mine you linked to you'll notice that if you hover on their user name they link to various junk sites.
I've resorted to vetting each new user based on their first comment. Apparently the spammers are attempting to boost their scam sites on the search engines.
but you sometimes don't respond to the comments. That's bad!!
I was getting an error message saying something like "Request-URI Too Large The requested URL /comment.g..."
Forum comments around the place seemed to suggest that's to do with the length of the URLs rather than necessarily the number of them but it's just having more than one is it?
Neurobonkers: Yeah the worst spammers are the ones where the spam link is in the name.
The "Generic Viagra" spammer who keeps targeting me actually leaves quite specific comments sometimes - he clearly reads the posts, he doesn't just copy and past from a Spam Textbook.
You also get ones who copy bits from previous real comments, and repost them. They can be hard to detect.
Anonymous #1: I know, I am trying to get through the backlog but I'm busy... I do try though.
Anonymous #2: Ah, OK. That might be it. I'd heard it was the number of links - and that does seem to be the pattern - but it could be length too.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Lol at the spammer above. Wordpress has a more intelligent filter, reason why i went with wordpress.
For some reason my blog attracts spammers like flies to a ratio of 99 spam to 1 comment.
I began suggesting to Google that they run comments through their email spam filters a couple of years ago. It became especially bad with the series of Chinese language spam with lots of links to Chinese porn.
It works well for my blogs. I like it, and now never get spam. I'm not aware of missing any comments.
Jayarava: The weird thing is that Google's email filter is a lot better than their Blogger one. When I get spam, the notification email almost always ends up in my Spam folder... but the comment gets through.
Great post! Keep it up the good work and also keep posting.
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