I can tell when a holiday is near based on the volume of spam email in my inbox. I receive twenty or so spam emails per day throughout most of the year: this is the curse of having a 20+ year old email address. But when the taps open wide in holiday season.
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I have been running a personal blog for many years- arguably since about 1997. I think I switched to WordPress in 2005 after previously managing with a static HTML page and then a PHPNuke website. I started getting comment ‘spam’ shortly after I started using WordPress: like email spam, spam comments are irritating messages that aren’t really created by actual people who have something meaningful to say.
Thankfully, the folks at Automattic who make WordPress provided something called Akismet to ‘block’ or filter spam comments. I activated Akismet, and managing spam became more or less a memory… but the numbers, goodness… the numbers are huge.
You may notice that the “furballs coughed up… #### today alone!” number in the header of this blog seems oddly inflated. Your observation would be correct: I suspect no more than a couple hundred humans visit this site in a given day. However, the spam robots visit in vast, unending waves.
I run a simple little blog here. I don’t make any money off of my site even, although I’m not adverse to doing so as long as it isn’t obtrusive. I don’t sell anything, nor do accept submissions other than comments. The posts here are my own: they aren’t scraped, syndicated from, or re-posted from anywhere else. Mostly, this site is a vanity site, like a billion others on the Internet.
Despite the complete lack of commercial value to my site, it gets spammed. Comment spam was a problem a few years ago, and I’ve managed that via Akismet and Bad Behavior plugins for WordPress. There are still about about 100 spam comments a day hitting my site, but only one or two make it through my watchdogs. Lately, however, there has been a new irritant: spam users.
Google sent me an email the other day telling me that my site had “inappropriate” content:
As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with adult or mature content.
Adult? Mature? On *my* site? Hmmm, this required some further investigation. It didn’t take long to find the problem- Google even gave me a sample URL. Apparently, sometime in the last few weeks some comment spammer bot found my photo gallery and started spewing link-farm comments in random spots throughout. And of course, the only person who has to do more work in this process is me.
Running a public website of any kind means having to deal with various unwanted guests. This blog, for example, receives around 300 spam comment posts a day, and any number of attempts to break in.
Someone has been submitting about five “Viagra!” news items to one of my websites every day now for about six months. Such news items are moderated, and never appear on the site since I delete them. That’s dumb.