So as of now I'm going to switch to registration mode for comments instead of anonymous to help prevent a field day of spamming my blog. Got a few folks going willy-nilly on my blog with spam here lately. Time costs have been getting rather high with cleaning up spam. Sure, allowing anonymous comments makes me especially open to attack but registration can be viewed as a layer of effort that may discourage others from commenting simply because of time, convenience or anonymity issues.
Well from this point on anyone who truly desires to comment will take the few moments or seconds to register and contribute. I do the same on other blogs myself when I want to truly contribute a comment. It's worth it plus I understand from the blogger/publisher point of view about why disabling open commenting is necessary.
BlogHarbor (the host for this blog) continues to fight spam and performs daily purging of Trackback spam that occurs on their blogs. Leaving your comments open however makes it more of a challenge. Registration is one of many steps toward fighting comment spam. It creates and very important layer and barrier to entry for spammers. Simply put, give them that extra step also and given the nature of spam programs that easily target open comment systems, a required registration policy is a good first step.
Spam sucks. We all know it. If you aren't fighting spam yet on your blog don't worry, you will. If you are fighting spam and winning then good for you. If you are fighting spam and losing or you are just trying to figure out what you can do, I've gathered a few good references here for you. These are particularly directed towards WordPress and MovableType blogs.
If you have a BlogHarbor blog one of the first things you need to do is disable anonymous commenting. Blogharbor purges Trackback from their blogs on a regular basis and continues to get better at it although some still gets through. But your Trackback spam warfare is will be much easier.
You also can make it easier for BlogHarbor to purge comment spam from your blog by requiring user registration because BlogHarbor can purge and block against the registered identity used to spam your blog if that should happen.
You can also use the Fire Wall feature of BlogHarbor blog and block know IP addresses sending you spam. This of course is NOT a cure all. Spammers use net proxy gateways and will spam from multiple IP addresses.
According to John Keegan of BlogHarbor, registered users are protected from exposure to spam themselves. Here is what John says:
"We are only purging Trackback spam. Your best protection against comment spam is to disable anonymous commenting... We can purge batches of comment spam when the spammer uses a user account to post the spam, but we cannot do batch purges of comment spam by anonymous guests."
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"Your user profile is protected from spam by, of course, authentication. You configure elements of your user profile such as your e-mail address to be visible to the Public, Friends only or Private. The information in your user profile will be displayed to other users depending on who they are and what you have decided they should be able to see.
The default setting is that your e-mail address is shown to Friends only. It will not be visible to automated robots. The default is that your e-mail address would only be shown to usernames you explicitly put on your Friends list and would only be shown to those users when they have authenticated their identity by logging in."
Most of the following information is for blog software applications that you are hosting yourself and allow you to have access to your .htaccess file on Unix/Linux running Apache. Sorry, no IIS info but why would you run your blog on IIS anyway? Okay, moving along...I won't go there. :)
Some solutions are filters that again, require access to your blog configuration.
If you are hosting your blog with a service such as BlogHarbor or Typepad I recommend that you check with your respective providers support center for their policy on fight spam and what you can do about it. Typepad also does a good job at fighting Trackback spam for you.
Here are some types of spam available to you today at the low, low price of free along with some great locations with information on how to fight back against unwanted spam.
Referrer Spam
Referrer spam is when someone fakes requests to a web site and sends those fake requests to a web server for the purpose of leaving referrer information in your access logs. The requests look like someone actually click on your link from another site. Since we blogger check referrers stats often and click links of interest, the idea here is to use your site stats logs to promote a site and get clicks by you.
Fighting Referrer Spam
From Spyware Info
Block Referrer Spam by ILoveJackDaniels
Blocking Referrer Spammers by Kuro5hin
Comment Spam
Wikipedia on Comment Spam
Fighting Comment Spam
Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam
This is great entry by Six Apart as it covers the nuts and bolts of comment spam and how it works. They also discuss some of the primary spam fight tactics such as some of the primary means of fight spam such as CAPTCHA, authentication and identification (registration), and Content Filtering. Great general read and good info for MovableType users.
Blogspam.org
Anti-spam tactics for MovableTyep users.
Combating Comment Spam for WordPress
Wordpress Wiki about fight comment spam if you are a WordPress user. Great Q & A, built-in WP tools, Spam plugins, WordPress hacks, and more.
TrackBack Spam
Just like comment spam accept that instead of using your blog commenting systems spammers uses Trackback pings instead resulting in you getting unwanted and unsolicited trackback ping messages designed to link to sites in an effort to boost pagerank or at least get people to click links in your trackback comments to extra attention and traffic. The usual suspects here...idiots promoting poker, sex, bestiality, pills, poker...whatever, all at your expense of your time and hard work.
Additional: Wikipedia on Blog Spam
Fighting Trackback Spam
Learning MovableType Blog on Trackback spam
Learning MovableType blog has great, succinct and focused coverage on content filtering for MovableType, MT hacks and a list of additional resources for fighting spam.
Fighting Trackback Trackback Spam for WordPress by Blogging Pro Blog
A straight forward option for fighting Trackback spam for WordPress users by Blogging Pro blog. Also check out the WordPress Support page here.
WordPress content filters by Photo Matt for WordPress users. Short article with lots of comments about WordPress solutions for fighting Trackback spam.
Supplemental:
NoFollow Tag
Google and others coming together to fight spam by allow publishers to remove the benefit of pagerank boost in comment spam using the (rel="nofollow") tag.
[EDITED 03.27.2005 11:05 PM]
