Tricky Spam, How Stupid Do You Think I Am?
May 12, 2004 20 | Comments (Closed)
It really bites that I’ve got to mention this, but I’m sick of people trying to take advantage of all my hard work.
I’ve noticed a disturbing trend here on Asterisk* and elsewhere. Let’s call it “Tricky Spam”.
What it is, in a nutshell, is a live person who leaves a semi-relevant comment on a subject with a link to their business or whatever and usually some nicely thought out title instead of a name. Sometimes they do use a name, but it’s fairly easy to spot the spam from the real valid comment.
Now — I’ve got no problem with someone who leaves a valid comment on a topic linking back to their site. But I do have a problem that masks their attempt to gain higher page-rank behind a semi-relevant comment.
You know exactly who you are. How dumb do you think I am? If you want to leave a comment, leave your name and while you’re at it try and add something to the discussion.
I’m not sure if I’ve made this clear before, but I reserve the right to delete any comment and ban anyone I wish from the site. I hope I don’t have to do this to often.
Sure I could just obscure the urls in my comments, but I truly hate that. It’s a horrible usability issue in my mind and it also takes a way the ability to attach credibility to a comment on sites I read. I really hope that’s not a permanent solution.
Look, I work hard on this site and I invite anyone who wants to contribute legitimately to join in. You don’t have to agree with me, you can flame me — that’s fine. But if you try and take advantage of me you’re gone.
Which reminds me. I’ve about had it with referrer spam. I don’t use that page too much anymore and as soon as I have time to remove it, it’s gone as well. You refer spammers will have to take advantage of someone else.
Filed under: Web General
Comments
1. Jeff Hume said:
Get free Viagra now!!!!
Heh, just kidding. I totally agree. Comment spam is getting totally out of hand and is just silly.
Posted on May 12, 2004 06:04 PM | #
2. Tom Werner said:
I too loathe the redirection scheme that MovableType now uses by default. I switched mine to show the full URL since I like to be able to see who the poster of a comment is without actually following the link.
At one point I looked for a MovableType plugin that would simply add the URL to a “title” attribute on the redirection link, but to no avail. I think that method could be ideal, as it would protect you against comment spam, but still allow people to see the poster’s URL via a mouse-over.
If I can ever find a free moment, I’ll just write it myself, but my PERL is a little dusty, and I never learned the Object Oriented part of PERL, so it’s more of a time devotion than I have time for right now.
Posted on May 12, 2004 06:06 PM | #
3. DarkBlue said:
Strangely, I have the opposite problem and I’m at loss as to why. People leave comments on my website but very few fill in the URL field!
Personally I’d prefer the URLs, since I like to look at other people’s work. However, I sympathise with your sentiment - nobody wants to be abused.
I am just beginning to suffer from referrer spam, which benefits no-one since I have never displayed referrers!
Don’t lose faith in your audience. The vast majority have a lot to offer. I have learned so much from yourself and the contributors to your website, it would be shame if you had to start restricting the freedoms we enjoy here.
Posted on May 12, 2004 06:09 PM | #
4. Nakijo said:
That is so weird. I’ve just spent the last two days wondering if people think I’m some kind of comment spammer, due to a strange response I received on one site. People typically make no reference to my (incredibly infrequent) comments, so I started to freak out about whether I was being ignored because folks think it is spam or they just think I’m an irrelevant tool
I, of course, don’t have to worry about it - having zero visitors to my unfinished site - but I have noticed that it is something that a number of people have wrestled with. Personally I think Tom Werner’s solution is the best possible. As you say, obscuring the links does strange things to the atmosphere of a site
Posted on May 12, 2004 08:20 PM | #
5. Georg said:
The first part of [4]Nakijo’s comment is just how I feel at times. The worst thing I can think of when giving a (rare) comment on anything, is that it’s mistaken for something else. Trying to do everything right, and for the right reasons, and ending up being black-listed or something, is kind of scary.
Looking for good solutions just to keep an ordinary e-mail service somewhat clean, I still have not figured out a good way to avoid washing out some good-intended people along with the bad. Manual cleaning is the only method that works for me so far, and I can not figure out how any software can do a close to perfect job at it.
From there to solve the problems on open web-loggs like Asterisk* without blocking out a lot of good-intended comments, is beyond me. I know that everyone would like to find solutions to this problem, so that we can enjoy this type of channels for two-way communications.
Please keep Asterisk* open like it is now for as long as you can. We just have to stay ahead of those who abuse ‘the open web’, or else it will become lost, for ever.
Posted on May 12, 2004 09:31 PM | #
6. Keith said:
To Nakijo and Georg – I really don’t think you have anything to worry about. The problem isn’t with stray comments from people who don’t usually join in – in fact I LOVE THAT – no, it’s when I see the same person commenting on 5 or so old posts using a name like “Web Developer” and a comment like “I agree”.
Also, if I’m in doubt and decided to delete a comment I don’t always black list. The thing is, I make my e-mail readily available (just waiting for more spam!) so if I ever deleted something that was legit the commenter could contact me about it.
Funny no one ever has….
Posted on May 12, 2004 10:08 PM | #
7. Nakijo said:
Thanks, Keith. Like I indicated, it was simply mild paranoia. Pretty easy on the net! I know what kind of spam you meant. We had an example on this page, didn’t we? Agreeing with you!
I agree with Georg that it is important to keep sites like this ‘open’. If a site doesn’t let me see the other commenters URLs, then I never follow those links. That restricts my enjoyment of the site and makes me less likely to come back. Unfortunately, such obscuration is growing far more common
Manual cleaning is probably the only effective way to do it, but a little automation could probably speed that up dramatically. Perhaps a script that compares your commenters’ IPs against your visitor logs? If a commenter has visited your site less than x times, then you are emailed the comment for a verdict. And obviously, if someone has been marked against in the past, that person’s posts might be flagged anyway - until you make a decision on black-listing
Or something like that…
Posted on May 12, 2004 11:01 PM | #
8. Tom Werner said:
Well I stayed up late and wrote it. For those interested parties, I’ve written a MovableType plugin that puts the commeter’s URL into the CommentAuthorLink as a “title” attribute. That will enable you to retain MT’s default redirection scheme while still letting people see their URL on mouseover. You can get the URLTitles v0.1 MT Plugin from my website.
Posted on May 13, 2004 01:16 AM | #
9. Josh Bryant said:
Thank you Tom! I am in the middle of my site right now and I think I will make use of that. It is an interesting idea. Really sad how there is so much crap that happens with spam on sites such as these. I honestly wasn’t aware that it was that much of a problem, but I can imagine if there was something to gain out of it.
What do people gain? A higher search engine or something? I am a bit confused as to why someone would take the time to do that. It seems that if they really want to spam so a site gets more attention, wouldn’t it be faster to just write a program that does it? Instead of wasting countless hours trolling blog sites.
Posted on May 13, 2004 01:57 AM | #
10. Brian said:
I’ve been using the MT Plugin MT-Blacklist. So far it’s been working great, I don’t get nearly as much comment spam as I used to. Try it, unless you already have.
Posted on May 13, 2004 07:03 AM | #
11. Eric said:
I will check out the plugin. I’ve resisted migrating to the latest MT because I hate the redirection scheme. It’s tough to remember who capitalizes their names, and who uses an initial, without being able to see what site we’re going to.
My experience with comment spam has been fairly small so far, and luckily they mostly comment on older posts, so I am able to delete them before anyone even sees them. Eventually I will try to figure out how to close comments on older posts.
Josh - people do get a higher search engine placement, perhaps. People who have no product and no talent grasp at whatever they can, like sending millions of emails to people that don’t want email, and vainly hoping for a higher placement in google for, um, enlargement. There are programs which try to auto spam, but it gets more difficult as more people are requiring preview before post, something I’m going to try eventually.
Posted on May 13, 2004 07:13 AM | #
12. Blakems said:
I looked at what google is doing now with blogger and they do a redirect now also, but I think they do much better job at than movable type. That is, the redirect url is viewable in the link, for example a redirect link from blogger looks like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=D&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blakems.com
Thus still allowing me to see the url. I think it is a good solution.
Posted on May 13, 2004 08:28 AM | #
13. pea said:
for a while i had a regular visitor who would leave relevant comments but would link to her personal business site. she also had a blog but never left that URL. i wasn’t sure what to do about it. it bugged me but as she was actually taking the time to read the entries and contributing her thoughts, i didn’t really think it was my place to do anything about the URL.
she stopped coming by after a while. maybe she realized i’m just not that popular and that visiting my site wasn’t going to lead to much traffic. whatever the reason, saved me the trouble of figuring out if there really was a problem to worry about.
Posted on May 13, 2004 11:38 AM | #
14. ColdForged said:
All manner of spamming – be it comment spam or referral spam – chaps my hiney. I’m running the MT 3.0 beta right now and it has more options for what to do with “unregistered” comments which I take advantage of. Before that, MT-Blacklist did the trick even more invisibly since I generally wouldn’t know of an attempted comment spam unless I looked at the MT log.
Referrer spamming is tougher to combat effectively, since they almost without exception spoof the source IP address. I’ve taken to adding .htaccess rules for the most common substrings in the referral strings, like “hilton” and “nude”. This has the unfortunate side effect of possibly blocking access to some legitimate referrers… but I don’t much care.
Aside from that, my eyeballs generally skip right over referrer spam anymore… they’re generally pretty obvious.
Posted on May 13, 2004 12:06 PM | #
15. Niket said:
The MT link redirect has another bigger problem: it breaks the browser back button. I like to use keyboard while browsing and being unable to use backspace is bad. Also,
I like to hover over the links to know if the comment by “Keith” is from the Asterisk-Keith or some other Keith.
Posted on May 13, 2004 12:06 PM | #
16. Octavio said:
I recently attended a seminar where SEO was to be discussed by representatives from 3 local SEO companies. Of course, they talked out the value of links to push a site further toward the top for a specific key. Generating these “links” appeared to be the business model for one of they companies and so it was of no surprise when he mentioned the value of links in blogs pointing to your site.
As someone that has a “personal” blog I was irate at the comment. Specially when the majority of the audience are small business owners that would not know any different. Owners who just want to make a some money with their online business and would take this advice to be the golden rule to profitablity.
This was my first experience dealing first hand with someone involved in SEO as their business. I think this person might’ve meant well with his advice trying to push his company’s value proposition but that is not what I heard. I was not able to speak with him to clarify his position but I certainly hope he is not advising his clients to post in blogs just for the sake of a link back. Even more, I hope his company is not automating this process for his clients.
Posted on May 13, 2004 12:24 PM | #
17. Tom T said:
In all honesty, so far the best solution I’ve seen is the home-grown one at youngpup. Basically it’s the “prove you’re a human” scheme with an image generated on the fly.
Of course, this doesn’t prevent real people from posting a spam, but he doesn’t get the kind of traffic you do (yet :), so maybe he hasn’t tried anything else.
Of course, knowing Aaron, he probably already has…
Posted on May 13, 2004 01:24 PM | #
18. DarkBlue said:
Like “youngpup” I wrote a Captcha system for my website (see: Defending Against Comment Spam). Apart from the obvious accessibility issues, I wonder if the Captcha is a barrier - with users not posting comments because they have to stop-and-think to deal with the system.
Posted on May 17, 2004 03:45 PM | #
19. Ryan Parman said:
There’s always Blocker.
I started writing it as a way to block email harvesters from getting my email address, then extended it to blocking idiots who were spamming my comments, then extended it to help block referrer spam.
It’s darn good now, and I’m working on making it better. Blocker users are who help me make it better, and it’s getting better all the time.
It’s relatively simple to install, written in PHP, and has worked like a charm for me since November.
Hope this helps!
Posted on May 17, 2004 05:40 PM | #
20. s t e f said:
The problem I see with “show me you’re human” is that it’s an accessibility issue.
I was at a conference with handicapped people a few days ago, and a blind man said that he could never complete forms on a company site (maybe it was yahoo, I can’t remember), because it asked him to copy what he ‘saw’ in the graphic area.
No, the answer is elsewhere. Although I’m not more clever than anyone, so I don’t have any to propose…
Posted on May 21, 2004 05:57 AM | #
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