Does submitting spam comments to blogs pay off for spammers?
Each day I receive an email from this blogs anti-spam application on how many spam comments it’s blocked in the last 24 hours. Meandering Passage averages between 15 and 30 bogus comments submitted per day, 100% of which are either blocked or held for my final determination.
This comment spam number use to be much higher until I installed the plug-in “Bad Behavior” which rejects many spam engines before they can deliver their payload.
I’m sure many sites receive much more spam then this blog but the available technology should allow it to be managed equally as well. From my experience it seems blog spam comment blocking is more effective currently then email spam filtering.
So, no spam comments get published at Meandering Passage and I would tend to believe that’s the norm for most managed blogs. If blog spam comments are being published it’s probably at poorly run or abandoned sites which should have low or no readership.
Then there’s those spam comments that don’t even have valid links embedded in them.
Where’s the payback for the comment spammers? I’m sure it must pay in some way or they wouldn’t continue spamming, but I’m having trouble seeing it.
I certainly hope that it doesn’t pay! I had to turn off pingbacks because I kept getting link spam. Does Bad Behavior stop this type of spam? I’m really pleased with Spam Karma, which does a great job of protecting the comments; however, those ping backs still get through because the look legit.
@Paul: Bad Behavior stops many of spam engines but some pingbacks can still make it through. I run Bad Behavior + Spam Karma II + Spam Karma’s Akismet Plugin for a total of 3 anti-spam comment protection layers. One or more of these three seem to always detect a comment or ping back as being spam. I’m not having any false negatives either…valid comments still go through.
Even the most legit looking spam pingbacks are held as a moderated comment so I can review them and if needed mark them as spam. All others either get the spam bucket automatically or approved automatically.
I swear sometimes I have to read moderated comments very carefully because some of the spam does look so legit. :-)
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