Thread: Todays Spammers

Hi,

What is going on with the spam today?

I had over 800 in the Akismet in less then 24hrs. Most days are only around 350.

Any Guess why so many?

How do spammers find your blog when normal people can't ? What are they using?

What is the most spam you have ever had in 24hrs?

Sami

Pick your tool that looks for blogs open to comments is my guess. I leave askimet on, sort the pile about once a month per site personally. What's funny is you can still find a large number of blogs that auto-approve comments which encourages the behaviour.

Hi,

I have askimet running on all my blogs. It just seemed odd that I have that many today.

Sami

I'm not using Akismet. It deletes too many legitimate comments, You are right on the spammers. I just deleted 370 spam comments that I got over the last month.

I'm using WP-SpamFree that blocks automated comment spam. The spammers still get through but not as much or they need to make a manual spam comment.

Spammers are using different tools, that not only will find your posts, but will also leave comments on them.

That is a lot of spam for one day, Sami. Your site must have made to a bunch of new lists used by the spambots.

The amount of spam has gone up dramatically over the past year. In fact, I find that about 90% of the comments are spam. Personally, I would never consider disabling Akismet. If I did, I would be overwhelmed with spam that I would have to sort through.

bogart, I'm surprised that you find that Akisment is deleting too many legitimate spam comments. I occassionally scan through the long list of spam comments and only rarely find a legitimate comment that was tossed into the spam bucket. If you look at how Akisment determines what it spam, it is primarily from things like porn links, IP addresses from known spam servers and comments that have been reported as spam by blog owners. If I determine that a comment is spam, I always click on the spam link, rather than simply trashing the comment. That gets reported back to Akisment.

I suppose it depends upon how you view comments. Most comments that tell me how wonderful my blog is are actually spam comments from spam bots. A search for the text in any of those types of comments typically reveals hundreds or thousands of blogs with the exact same comment.

I see some blogs where a post has 50 comments and almost every one is spam. If the comment is unrelated to the post, it doesn't add an value to the page. It is like adding gibberish to your post.

Originally Posted by TopDogger

That is a lot of spam for one day, Sami. Your site must have made to a a bunch of new lists used by the spambots.

Hi,

Must something last night I got almost 150 in about three hrs. I have not checked yet today will do that next.

Sami

Originally Posted by TopDogger

bogart, I'm surprised that you find that Akisment is deleting too many legitimate spam comments.

Akisment is among the best anti-spam plugins for WordPress. The issue is that Akisment automatically deletes the spam box. So, if you don't frequently check the spam box you loose so good comments.

Also, some of the IPs that are in the Akisment database shouldn't be blacklisted.

According to the Akismet site, if you click on the Approve or Not Spam link for any legitimate comment that you find in the spam bucket (False Positives), a message is sent to Akisment to correct their mistake. It looks like it works the same as the Spam link, but in reverse.

FAQ � Akismet

Sami, something strange is going on with comment spam. I was checking the Akismet stats on some of my tech blogs. I found one day where Akismet caught 810 spam postings in a single day on one of the blogs. That was an unusual spike.

Hi,

Looks like thing are back to normal again for the moment. Spam is back down, must of been a one day deal. Crossing fingers anyway.

Sami