BLOG SPAM REDUX

James Joyner · Friday, October 3, 2003 · 2 Comments

Over the last couple of days, I’ve gotten a lot of rather ungrammatical advertisements posted in my comments sections. Steven Taylor has had the same problem at PoliBlog.

The really puzzling part of this phenomenon is that the comments are posted on very old posts–some months old–that are therefore unlikely to be read by many people. That makes it moderately harder for me to delete them, certainly, but it is still a strange way to go about the enterprise.

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About James Joyner
James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. Follow James on Twitter.

Comments

42nd SSD says:

Friday, October 3, 2003 at 12:37

Sounds like the blog software folks need to either require registration before posting, or add something to the post dialog to verify the poster is a literate human… yeah, the spammers are getting really desperate.

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joy says:

Friday, October 3, 2003 at 13:06

Steven, if you still have the MT confirmation email, I would personally out the spammer. Post his IP addy and email address and if it’s hawking something illegal, complain to the dude’s Web hosting company. (I don’t see complaining to the person’s ISP unless they’ve written something truly harassing.) If anything, by posting the IP address, it’ll be google-able so others can see his trail.

I’ve been doing that for my spammers. I figure that soon enough they’ll learn not to visit my site.

Also, I’m not convinced it’s a bot doing the work, especially since the user agents I’ve seen associated with the spam has so far been just normal browser strings. I haven’t seen evidence to convince me that it’s occurring on a wide automated basis.

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