Too Much Comment Spam Lately
November 13th, 2008 by 
Rory Harper
Hey, Brainiacs –
As you may or may not have noticed, we’ve been having a fair amount of comment spam get through the filters lately. I’ve killed them as quickly as I can, and I suspect that Steve has done likewise.
I find it annoying, as I got spoiled at how good our filters have been until recently. Something seems a little off-kilter, as, additionally, a few comments that shouldn’t have gotten filtered have turned up in moderation.
If there’s a delay on one of your comments appearing, you might want to make sure that it doesn’t have more than one URL in it and that your return email address is either blank, or not ‘fishy-looking’, whatever that might be. You might want to also leave the field for your website’s URL blank.
For what it’s worth, we generally don’t hold or delete comments unless we find them to be obvious boilerplate or the most crude of trolling. Simply disagreeing with somebody generally won’t get you filtered out or deleted, unless you engage in less-than-entertaining ad hominem attacks, or you deliberately try to piss Caroline off and fail to do so.
Hugs,
Rory
Posted in Daily Life | 
12 Comments »
November 13th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Some of my post never did show up, i thought it was just me. Glad it was not…
November 13th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
James — If any of your posts went missing, it definitely wasn’t on our part. We get a HUGE amount of comment spam that gets caught, so much that Steve and I have quit looking at the list.
I just now looked and we’ve passed 50,000 spam comments filtered out since EOB opened.
Even our GMail account gets too much spam.
We don’t moderate, which means that comments don’t have to be approved beforehand before they’ll be visible here, just that some may get filtered out by the software, or may get deleted by one of us if it seems to be spam or abuse — and we get almost nothing that we consider abusive.
If a post of yours doesn’t show up here, just send me a quick note about it at my nospam728 at-the-gmail-place account, and I’ll check it out.
November 14th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Yeah, please let us know. It’s a lot easier for us to search on a specific comment and commentor, than it is for us to plow through all the viagra.
November 14th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Oh, also — Don’t write comments using the Cyrillic alphabet. That’s a sure way to get filtered.
Just in case you were contemplating doing that….
November 14th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Точно!
December 7th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Привет, я думала что это совсем не так происходит:)
——————————————-
Мой блог: http://SPAM-LINK-DELETED
December 7th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Oh, hell, yes. This one’s gotta stay. Though you’d have to put a gun to my head to get me to click through on that link.
…Forget what I said about not using the Cyrillic alphabet in your posts. :0
December 7th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
We should probably kill the links, though. Nuke spammability!
December 8th, 2008 at 1:00 am
Yeah, you’re right, Morgan. I just took care of it.
I think what I like about this sort of spam is that it’s completely incomprehensible to me. It could be about anything, maybe even something interesting. Therefore, it doesn’t make me stupider just to look at it, like normal spam does.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
顶~~~~我叫生活健康网，希望能交个朋友哈！
December 17th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Oh, hell, yeah.
But I had to delete the URL…..
I think I’ll leave up any comment spam that hits this thread.
December 17th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
My, yes.
You are one twisted puppy. I love it.