The Home Biz Blog

Resurrection + Fighting comment spam with various tools

Don't worry, don't worry, I'm still alive ;)
I've just had waaaaay too much to do the last few months - and they went by fast, I didn't realize it had been so long since my last post. As I said in a previous post I expected to have less time to blog because I was starting to study Computer Science at Reykjavik University - and it seems my "prophesy" was correct.

I've also been so caught up with other things involving my online business that I just haven't found time to sit down and write a post on this blog. Actually, right now it's pretty hectic because I've just finished this semester's final exams and now I'm starting a 3-week project. But I decided that I just had to let you know that The Home Biz Blog is far from over. I hope to be able to write here for many years to come.

Well, to get to the second part of the title of this post... For a long time now (almost since I started this blog) I've gotten gibberish comments on my posts. This is a common problem with blogs, message boards, guestbooks, etc. called comment spam or blog spam. Basically it's just spammers spidering the internet, commenting on entries and leaving their URL to e.g. improve their link populariy. I've been getting quite a few of these comment spams and now recently I also got spam-trackbacks!

Until now I've been manually deleting every comment spam and adding to my "IP ban list". That is not only time-consuming but it's definitely not a complete solution because these spammers just randomly find open IP addresses they can use and post comments using many different IP addresses.

By the way, if you're trying to comment but can't because I've blocked your IP address (or for some other reason) please let me know and I'll fix it.

So, I got my self a blacklist plug-in for Movable Type called MT-Blacklist that filters all comments and trackbacks. I can add any keyword I want to that filter so if you happen to be commenting and you get an error message it might be that you are using a common spam word. This is a great tool and I recommend it if you're having trouble with your Movable Type blog.

The major blog giants have also joined forces against comment spam and generated the new rel="nofollow" attribute on links which prevents websites from getting credit (increased PageRank) towards search engine ranking through posting comments on blogs. There is even a nifty nofollow plugin available for Movable Type users. I've installed it and it seems to me like it's working 100% - so if your main goal by commenting is to increase your PageRank you can forget about it. (But I might be interested in exchanging links with you, just let me know).

I also found this tool called "Spam Poison" that is supposed to be fighting spammers by redirecting their spiders (robots) to "..an infinite loop and will get lots of fake e-mail addresses -- dynamically generated using domains owned by spammers, adding enormous quantities of bogus data to the databases of the spammers, thus poisoning those files so badly that they become essentially useless." I can't confirm that this works, but it can't hurt to have it on your blog.

Well, I hope some of this will help in the war against spammers. It looks like it has worked on my blog because I've been getting very few comment spams lately - and if a comment spam gets through I'll just vaporize it with MT-Blacklist and blacklist their domain and IP address. Even if I wouldn't do that the spammers wouldn't benefit much because Google won't count that link in the comment towards increasing their PageRank :)

Posted by Hannes Johnson at April 26, 2005 1:44 AM | TrackBack | bookmark on del.icio.us