Slashdot Mirror
Spam Rapidly Increasing In Weblog Comments
dsurber writes "BBC News has a nice article discussing 'flyblogging', the phenomenon of spammers leaving advertising-related posts on personal weblogs. The writer comments: 'None of the other blogs I contribute to or run has been affected yet, but I can only assume it is a matter of time before the spammers move in, as they did first with UseNet and then with e-mail. It depresses me to think that any open medium can be so easily undermined by people with no scruples, no sense of responsibility and no idea of the damage they are doing.'" It seems a little surreal that people are having to develop anti-spam weblog tools.
They would seem vulnerable to spamming. I was on a lojban wiki for awhile which was under the radar enough to avoid it, but don't know about now.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Since most blog spammers will search for "Remember personal info?" in various search engines to quickly find personal blogs, I edited my MovableType templates. Now, instead of saying "Remember personal info?" on the comments page, I have something else that spammers don't normally search for.
So why not try the best anti-spam tool on the market and wave goodbye to those pesky spams?!
Perhaps these 'web logs' could come up with a kind of 'moderation system' to let users filter out the crap.
I read LiveJournal and I have noticed this. Anonymous comments with a link to some page I guess they are hoping you will click on out of curiousity. LiveJournal allows you to easily delete such comments but like e-mail spam it is still a hassle. The solution is simple: stop buying what spammers are offering and they will go under soon after.
Use the same type of human verification system that Yahoo uses when signing up for an e-mail account. If you can't type in the mangled letters in the image, then your post to the weblog is ignored. This would only be required for anonymous postings - if you're logged in, presumably you've already passed the human verification test upon account creation, so you don't have to go through the hassle each time you want to post.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
This is reason #1 why I don't allow comments on my weblog or any other site I run. Have you read the comments most people post on these things, anyway? They're even more asinine than the weblogs themselves...
Not every single web site needs to be a two-way communication system. That's what email and discussion groups are for.
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
1) Only allow people with verified accounts to post.
2) With every post, display the advertising policy (buying an ad on the site is $5000)
3) Make sure they confirm that if their message is an ad, they agree to pay the $5000
4) Host their ad for them, and collect your money. Small claims is helpful here.
Although the term flyblog has been used already to mean either blogging about flying, or blogging while flying, I would like to claim it for the practice of posting spam comments to people's blogs like this: I have just been comprehensively flyblogged
I like I have been splamogged much better. Just rolls off the tongue.
Yes. That's partly why Google's search results are nearly useless any more - especially while looking for information about specific brand-named products. This whole blog-spam thing has been known about for a very long time, and I have yet to see it addressed - I'm surprised that it's finally picked up by the media though. Maybe that'll force Google to update their ranking code before their IPO.
I had the same problem with the guestbook on my website. I was used to the occasional, manually entered, advertisement that I would then promptly remove. However, suddenly my guestbook was being hit with dozens of spam advertisements at a time, all at the same time. This was taking place every couple of days. It was always the same ads with bogus compliments, but the source IP addresses would vary widely from attack to attack. A review of my access log showed spybots looking for the presence of certain common guestbook scripts, one of which I was using. Then later, the spambot would hit my site executing the scripts directly. I got around it by changing the file name of the script. Normal users to my site would follow the link and get to the guestbook with no problem. But since the spambots depended on the script being a certain name, they would fail with a 404 error.
Phoenix
You're blogging to publish your thoughts to the world, right? Weeelllll, if your users want to say something, let them get their own blog. There's no law that says you have to start your own mini-slashdot. Make your blog read-only and the spam problem goes away.
Doesn't it?
I think the whole "open forum" thing is overrated... Look at all the junk that gets published here, on Slashdot, one of the more serious of the open forums (yeah, I know how crazy THAT comment is, but it's true).
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I've got a website.
/dev/null .
Last year, I closed my hotmail account and two spammed-to-heck e-mail accounts. To keep old friends and family from getting shafted, I had an autoreply attatched to those addresses, announcing that those addressess were closed and that I could be reached through the contact form on my website, prior to sending those e-mails to
To date, through this manual entry, effort-draining contact form, I have had at least 20 offers to increase my manly-ness, 10 offers to find the love of my life, and 5 death threats from annoyed spammers. Only one charitable organization had a problem with my auto-reply, because a spammer was using their e-mail address to send junk to me over and over again.
It's taken eight years since email spam became an issue for signifigant legislation to pass.
We need an easily amendable federal law that simply says unwanted, unsolicited, uncompensated advertising is simply illegal.
Usenet, fax, email, public chat, blogs, RPC messenger, any forum that allows public input for free has become a spammer magnet. They don't own it, get them out.
We need a law that says this, as a statement that to live under our social contract you can't be an annoying louse.
*ducks*
How much truth is there to the statement that 2 + 2 = 4? A lot. Why? Because that's how it's defined to work.
Uh, that's how Google documents it. That's how all of Google's employees define it. That's how everybody's experience pans out. Maybe they're all just making shit up with nobody ever calling them on it, but I'd argue for "that's actually how it works" myself. Try going to Google and clicking "About".
Only if the log owners let the spam sit there long enough to be googled. If they do that, then my guess would be quite possibly yes.
Maybe compile a list of such spammers, then a list of the advertised sites. I'd like a checkbox on my google searches that says, "Ignore results on sites whose page rank is mostly due to asshole tactics."
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The BBC article misses the point, as does a similar article in Wired. Seems the editors are more focused on name-dropping and doomsdaying than on focusing on some recent solutions. For example:
Point is
Just so long as no one attempts to use a rather evil solution I discovered here on
--- have you healed your church website?
Jeremy Zawodny on this:
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Russell Beattie on this:
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Michael Fagan on this:
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My hobbyist project was picked up by Google after a while, but it wasn't until I retroactively changed my comment signature here on Slashdot and on Kuro5hin (thereby creating many links to my project page) that it went to the top of the search results. It wasn't my intent to subvert Google in any way - I was quite surprised by the dramatic result.
There have been some less-than-scrupulous advertising companies in the business of that publishing dummy machine-generated web pages to exploit this trick. The dummy pages were typically filled with repitions of some nonsense paragraph, with self-links (to other dummy pages) and client-sponsored links interspersed here and there. The idea was that the self-linking would make the site look like a large, legit site to Google, which would mark it as relatively well-trusted and influential. Then Google would dutifully note the client-sponsored links and rank them highly. I believe Google has worked on ways to stop this; I don't know how successful they've been, or if the dummy-site makers are still around.
I don't reallly have a blog, as such, but my domain does have a PHP site that has galleries of my photographs which viewers are able to comment on. Lately i've been getting spam from people who apparently randomly find my site and decide they have to leave their mark (much like dogs leave their marks on bushes)
my solution? Have MySQL log IP addresses along with the comment submission. My intended audience is so small I know the majority of the viewers personally, and thus have no issue walling off an entire ISP ( after reporting that IP address to said ISP's abuse dept)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
but it was a little different, the messages that were already there were replied to, but they had "empty" response, unless you looked reallu close one "character" in the reply to message now had a link attached to it.
I dont remember where it was linking to but I think it was a seach index or something similer.
were they trying to boost the ranking on search engines by having these so called links in place?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Wake up and smell the bacon, people. The techno-utopianism of Wired when it was boosting the dotcom era into orbit has proven itself a poor match with human nature on all fronts.
The benificient fathers of the internet made two horrendous design decisions concerning the final destination of a global internetwork: excessively strong anonimity and a near zero cost for dumping pollution into public media.
Privacy, openness, spam-free: pick any two.
For anyone who looked into ECC yesterday, you might have noticed that RSA has ideal properties for preventing some of this mess: expensive to sign a certificate, cheap to verify, and the ratio becomes worse as you scale up.
If every spam artifact was signed with an anonymous RSA cert (anyone could make as many of these as they wish), as soon as one spam is confirmed, every other post signed by the known-spam cert could be instantly revoked.
This would force the spammers to create a new anonymous cert for every spam instance. Yet with RSA certs, the computational cost to generate a cert is vastly greater than the cost to verify the cert.
As an added step, the cert could require the IP address of both endpoints to be embedded inside (the server would reflect back the IP source address it sees, and then ask for an anonymous cert to be generated at a desired RSA key size).
We won't have to damage anonymity very much to vastly increase the cost of dumping pollution.
In this respect, weblogs would be a good place to start. This is a relatively new technology that could be retrofitted at one percent of the cost of a global e-mail infrastructure upgrade. It really doesn't matter if you inconvience a few bloggers working out the kinks, these people have not much useful to do in any case.