Blog Spam is Annoying.

August 3, 2007 11:56 AM

Blog spam question-- why would blog spammers only be posting on a single (months old) entry on my blog?

I have a blog hosted on Movable Type. I get 3-5 spam comments per day, but the weird thing is that they are only ever posted on a single entry. Just curious if anyone knows if there's any reason for this?

In a related question, why do MT's spam filters suck so much? How hard is it to tag something with the word Cialis in it? I have it set to most aggressive, but that flags all of the real comments and lets through half of the spam ones.

posted by miss tea to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Does the entry in question have a particularly high Google pagerank for keywords the spammers are interested in?
posted by kindall at 12:02 PM on August 3, 2007

I don't know, but I did want to chime in that on a domain I never actually got around to using, I installed MT and posted a single entry that was a complete joke. It was a recipe for a very clearly non-food item. And yet I had gotten several blog spams there as well.

I think the blog spammers cast a very wide net indeed.
posted by tastybrains at 12:07 PM on August 3, 2007

I get the impression this is a typical comment-spammer tactic. They probably expect that you are less likely to notice comments on old entries.
posted by adamrice at 12:08 PM on August 3, 2007

why do MT's spam filters suck so much?

Try the Akismet plugin. 4331 spam attempts caught since I installed it.
posted by Leon at 12:08 PM on August 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

They probably have good luck (a) exploiting "recent comments" features and (b) having comments on old entries not immediately junked as a result of interfering with active comment streams.
posted by caitlinb at 12:41 PM on August 3, 2007

Seconding Akismet. It's a godsend.
posted by jeffxl at 1:01 PM on August 3, 2007

Sweet, I will try Askimet. Thanks!

The odd thing is that I have tons of older entries, and the comments are just on one. It doesn't have a high page rank as far as I know, and it never gets hits off google according to my analytics.
posted by miss tea at 1:27 PM on August 3, 2007

If you filter out the word cialis, it'll bring up false positives because people like to say words like "socialism" and "specialist". As a workaround, you might try blacklisting " cialis" (that's cialis with a space before it).
posted by evariste at 1:44 PM on August 3, 2007 [1 favorite]

I third Akismet, but I think, judging by my own limited experience, that the spamming is totally random. Over the course of a few years, I think you'll see it even out across all your older posts.
posted by Phanx at 1:48 PM on August 3, 2007

reCAPTCHA is the best solution I'm aware of for these sorts of things.
posted by phrontist at 3:34 PM on August 3, 2007

I have no idea why it happens but I have the exact same experience as you-- one particular old post which gets spam comments a little more than once a week, while I get maybe one spam comment a month on all the other dozens and dozens of entries combined. I'm on Blogspot.
posted by EmilyClimbs at 9:04 PM on August 3, 2007

Hi miss tea, I work with the MT team and can probably help you a bit. First, sorry you're having this problem! I think we can fix it. To answer your immediate question, some (less sophisticated) blog spammers use list of target posts/addresses for their spam, preferring posts that they (often wrongly) think are more popular, more-linked-to, or have higher PageRank in Google or other search engines. The lists aren't usually very accurate and certainly aren't scientific, but this is spamming -- it doesn't have to be super accurate.

In regard to your question about MT, the built-in spam tools are designed to let you update them with words or links you want to block, though depending on the version you're using (I don't see a link to your blog in your profile?) it can be a little tricky to find those settings. There are certainly a good number of people having luck with some of the plugins listed above, but if you're amenable, I'd love to try upgrading you to the latest version of MT and see if you have better result. Email me at [e-mail] if you're game, and I'll talk to our tech folks about getting you fixed up.
posted by anildash at 5:50 PM on August 5, 2007 [1 favorite]