Fresh when it gets here from
Julie Barrett
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Karen's been talking about possible comment spam on some of her blog entries. She's fortunate in that she's only had a few entries - if they're actually comment spam. It's a tough call sometimes. I would say that if the link goes to a nonsense splog (spam blog), a link farm, or an adult site, then kill it. Otherwise, it's probably not doing any harm, especially if the account has been closed.
When I had the old photo album up I had comments turned on. Unfortunately the software didn't allow for e-mail notification of comments. One day when I went to check I found tons of comments that said stuff like, "nice picture," or "I wish I could take such pictures." The first couple were a little flattering, but then I saw a pattern. Virtually all of them pointed to a few Blogger blogs full of nonsense - and lots of links. The other comments pointed to what appeared to be adult web sites, based on the URLs. And some of the comments were blatant ads for adult web sites. Of all the comments, one was legitimate. I recognized the name and e-mail address of the poster. I left her comment, deleted all of the others, and then turned off comments. Her comment eventually went away when I deleted the photo album in favor of the new one.
Further, my contact page was hit with several nonsense messages that appeared to be tests to see if the sender could use the code that sent the comments to me as a relay for spam. After several failed attempts to lock down the code I took the page down.
In addition, there have been several rounds of spam sent out from my domain name. I know because I get a ton of bounced messages. These started before I even had a contact page up. I suspect that those were bot programs placed on on someone's unprotected or underprotected computer and they pulled my domain from an address book or perhaps a web cache. The bottom line: If you ever get spam from our domain name, it didn't come from us. I'd love to see the headers and help track down the perp as it gives us a bad name.
The security steps I've taken so far on comments seem to be working. I know it's a pain to have to approve of comments before they appear, but it helps to weed out the obvious spam. If the other security measures seem to be working after a few weeks then I'll experiment with allowing comments to be posted to the site as soon as they're submitted.
Yeah, I'm paranoid. But I don't have the time to deal with spam.
Tags: Blogging