Back from a short but very invigorating holiday here. Took the family and headed out for the Israeli desert to escape local rainstorms. I made a Facebook fan page for my Israeli Mom profile, so you can see my pictures even without adding me as a friend. Lots of cool Negev trip pictures here.
Back to work here! One of the things I had to deal with was comments on my blogs. Some were approved and some tagged as spam. Now, sometimes it’s very easy to tell which is a genuine comment and which is spam, and sometimes it can be more difficult. I plan on making a post with my comment spam cues, but today, I’ll just share this one tip:
If you’re not sure if a comment is spam or not, Google for a sentence it contains. If you see the exact same phrase used in comments on other blogs, it’s probably spam.
That’s it for today. Thank you all for the constructive comments (all approved). If you left me a comment and you think you got marked as spam by mistake, please read my Commenting Policy to see what might have gone wrong and leave me a new comment.
I use Mollom http://mollom.com/ to filter out comment spam on my Restoring Tally blog and another site I maintain. It works pretty well. I don’t get many regular comments, but I get a lot of comment spam. You can report spam that Mollom misses, so it gets smarter as you use it. There is a plugin for WordPress.
Twitter: DennisEdell
says:
This is how Akismet works, the best anti-spammer around!
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog post ..The $10 Winner And More Good News….. =-.
Had no idea that tally meant that… Can you please not use keywords as your name next time? thanks!
And thanks for the comment – I somehow stick to askimet, myself. It works, so far. I guess if I ever get too overwhelmed by spam, I may start shopping for other methods.
Good tip, comment spam is getting trickier and trickier, software now analyzes your meta tags and writes comment spam tailored to your post so it includes some information from your post in it, which makes it harder to google, but usually I can tell.
.-= Dragon Blogger´s last blog post ..Can You Quit Your Day Job to Blog? =-.
Very true. I guess the fact we CAN still tell the difference fairly easily goes to show that AI still has a long way to go
Twitter: DennisEdell
says:
The big issue is, the spammers are actually getting cleverer in some ways. (Cleverer may not sound like a word, but it passed the spell checker lol).
I’ve approved a few only to go back and spam them after seeing the exact same thing on 20 other blogs. This is one area where they are quite dumb; for some reason not realizing that bloggers group by niche.
FYI – every now and again Akismet will catch mine by mistake, lease keep an eye out.
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog post ..The $10 Winner And More Good News….. =-.
Twitter: DennisEdell
says:
Are my comments going through?
.-= Dennis Edell´s last blog post ..The $10 Winner And More Good News….. =-.
Twitter: techmaish
says:
That is really very good tip to search the phrase in google.
Because the same thing happened with my blog. I got a comment which was about 150 words. When i search the phrase on google, i found the same comment in allot of blogs.
.-= Tech Maish´s last blog post ..Make Money From Your Twitter Followers =-.