I spend a little time each evening cleaning up my comment spam. I get anywhere between 5 and 15 comment spams each day, with some days going far beyond that. IP banning of those cock-knockers has become a somewhat satisfying pastime for me.
Then, today, I notice that this post has a trackback. I check the trackback and, lo and behold, I discover that it's spam. *sigh*
Trackback spam. Freakin' trackback spam. Who'da thunk it? I don't even know how they managed to get it to work. Aren't they supposed to link to my site in order for the trackback to show up on my blog? How the hell did they figure out how to do this? fuck it, I don't want to know. I just want it to stop.
I remember when blogging used to be fun, instead of a chore where I have to stay one step ahead of freakin' spammers.
Just a note to you spammers -- It doesn't work. People don't click on your obvious spams, except for the blogger who has to check your spam occasionally to see if it actually is spam. And then you get deleted (hopefully) and your spamming IP address gets banned. Links to your shitty shit in a comment spam are ignored 99.999999999 percent of the time. If people are into reading blogs, they're savvy enough to know a comment spam when they see one. Save the Internet, and your souls, by stopping your insidious spamming.
Seriously, Satan is just finishing up with his designs for a 10th circle of hell, specifically dedicated to e-mail, blog comment and blog trackback spammers. Because Satan and I are on good terms with one another, he gave me a sneak peek at the blueprints and, man, let me tell you, you will definitely not want to go there. I won't go into great detail, except to say the red hot anal poker subdivision looked particularly unpleasant: one ten second insertion for each individual spam you sent out during your lifetime.
And don't even talk to me about Satan's electronic automated groin-kicking machine. He was giggling the whole time he showed me how that thing works. It's obvious Satan is just itching to try it out. Woe be it to the first spammer to end up in hell, because Satan will no doubt practice and experiment with the groin-kicker for a good ten hours on that poor soul.
Seriously, spammers, it's time to get out of the business now. I've seen your future, and it is terrifying indeed.
Posted by Ryan at May 17, 2005 04:16 PMWell, obviously someone clicks on the spam ... otherwise they wouldn't bother.
Posted by: david at May 17, 2005 04:47 PMFair enough, david. I can accept that. But, even if someone clicks on a comment spam, how many of those duped souls do you imagine actually buy something from a site they were suckered in to visiting? Argh. How can the Internet be so cool, and suck so bad at the same time?
Posted by: Ryan at May 17, 2005 04:58 PMDude, trackback spam is old news. It's not as frequent as comment spam but it's out there and getting worse. Get MT-Blacklist....very nice. No more IP banning, you use terms and patterns and everyone pools their lists together in a master list that you can check to update your own. And it makes deleting all your spam as easy as a few clicks.
And the spammers aren't posting spam to get you to click on them. They do it to boost their google ranking.
Bloggers, almost by definition are link whores. They trade links and therefore rank highly according to Google's algorithms. And these spammers are trying to gain by comparison. They earn alot of "google rank points" by being linked to by you.
Posted by: Kevin at May 17, 2005 11:13 PMCome play poker at my online casino. Make millions!
Posted by: Rick at May 18, 2005 08:57 AMWell, Kevin, it was new to ME, and that's all that's really important.
Posted by: Ryan at May 18, 2005 09:07 AMKevin pretty much summed up what I was going to say.
I turned off trackbacks on my site. I never really care who is linking to something I wrote, anyway.
I have MT-blacklist, but I still have to spend a couple minutes a day deleting new spam and adding keywords to my list.
I also close the comments thread of old posts that seem to be getting a lot of spam (with the exception of old posts that still generate legitmate comments).
Now I'm starting to deal with referrer-spam, which really pisses me off.
Posted by: David Grenier at May 18, 2005 09:34 AMNot to be a poop-head, but the biggest problem is that you're running Movable Type. I switched over to WordPress and had a 99% reduction in spam annoyances. WordPress is much more efficient in dealing with spam, and also gets rid of those pesky rebuilds.
It's worth the time and effort to migrate. And it's surprisingly easy.
Posted by: Keith at May 18, 2005 10:04 AMBut Ryan, if you click my link, enter in your details (and a current credit card to verify that you're over 18) then we can party tonight. Come on, baby, don't you deserve it? I'll bring my friend, V1agra spam and we will get crazy.
I killed the trackback thing on Haloscan, the only people who ever used it were spammers so screw them. What I liked was that I used to have a FizBox guestbook but it kept getting spammed so I killed it. And it kept getting spammed for about three weeks afterwards even when there were no links to it anywhere.
Posted by: Johnny Huh? at May 18, 2005 04:50 PM
Stumble It!
