2:24 pm - Damn Spam
I was getting Set to make a nice post about a cool website I found that tracks prices of Transformers Alternators (one of my more recent obsessions).
Unfortunately when I arrived at my blog I saw a new comment on my latest post. “Oh!” I thought, “someone left me something to read!”. Unfortunately what was left for me to read was SPAM for Allegra and Zoloft. Not exactly something I would look forward to for reading. Checking the comment logs it would seem that most of my blog was Spammed with various cheap drug links. ENOUGH! I shut down the comment system completely. Then I went into the database and manually closed commenting on each individual post (thank god I learned SQL). Then I went and set to not allow any links in the comments. Finally I removed all the SPAM and put the commenting system back online.
Here is what gets me. The reason people spam comment systems on blogs is so that their link count goes up on Google. Recently, after many a complaint from blog software makers, Google and several popular blog software makers developed an HTML tag that gets wrapped around links in blog comments after posting. What this does is alert Google to completely ignore those links when ranking, making any effort towards comment spamming completely useless (aside from totally pissing off people who run blogs/me). As soon as I caught wind of this I patched my blog for it. Yet still I get spammed…
With the changes I’ve made any comment that includes a link will automatically get whipped out immediately. Further I’ve locked out all future commenting. I’m going to keep the newest or newest few posts (I haven’t decided yet) open for comments, so in the even that some idiot wasting time spamming me will only be able to spam a single post or two instead of the 250+ posts I have in the entirety of my blog.
