Since I implemented comment and trackback moderation on this blog a couple of weeks ago, the amount of spam I’ve been getting has steadily increased.
Now it’s averaging between three and five such hits every day. May not sound much at all in the context of the overall blogosphere, but that adds up to at least 21 a week, 84 a month and over 1,000 a year. Multiply that by just 1,000 of the 14 million or so other English-language blogs out there and you can see the scale of this problem.
The current average will go up a bit now as yesterday I received 12 in one day, all re sex and pills from the same spammer at IP address 84.242.95.27 which, according to the nifty ForMyIP.com, is located in the Czech Republic and belongs to an ISP called Karneval Media S.R.O. Needless to say, he’s now a banned IP address.
What’s good, though, is that none of the crap will ever see the light of day on this blog because of moderation, part of the raft of service enhancements for TypePad blogs implemented by Six Apart last month. It is a bit time-consuming to have to go into TypePad and delete the stuff from the pending queue, not to mention wasted bandwidth usage, but that’s preferable to having to do it after the event which would be the case without moderation.
What I find a bit curious is that nearly all spam during the past month or so has been targeting posts I’ve written during the first quarter of this year; hardly any spam aimed at recent posts. Is that signficant of anything? Maybe the spammers or the auto-senders think older posts are less likely to be on the current radar screen of the blogger. But I really have no idea!
I’m sure we’ll see more bloggers putting up defensive walls though devices like comment and trackback moderation as well as with some intelligent tools that can filter inbound comments and trackbacks looking for key phrases and other indicators of spam.
It doesn’t stop the spam but at least with such protective measure in place, you get the satisfaction in knowing that your blog won’t be an unwitting channel for these odious peddlers.
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
