June 14, 2007

Comment Spam in Blogger

"Hi, Added a new value add to my blog this weekend - a news widget from www.widgetmate.com. I always wanted to show latest news for my keywords in my sidebar. It was very easy with this widget. Just a small copy paste and it was done. Great indeed."

Blogger doesn't offer an option to detect spam comments. The only options you have are to add a captcha to prevent automated spam or to moderate the comments, but that takes away from the value of an instant feedback. Even if Blogger adds rel=nofollow to all the links from comments and you don't improve their ranking in the search engines, "bloggers" like Addison post the same spam comment every 5 minutes to promote some mediocre widget site. Because Addison posts the comments manually, he can enter the captcha correctly.

But Blogger could at least check if similar comments were posted to a single blog multiple times. Or use the Akismet model.

It's always surprising to see how a company that actively fights against web spam is defeated by some comment spammers that use cheap methods to promote their latest widgets.


15 comments:

  1. Akismet really pales in comparison to Spam Karma 2.

    Where Akismet lets 15-30 spam comments through on my blog in a week, Spam Karm 2 lets through less that 3 a MONTH.

    If Blogger is looking for some good anti-spam software, they should look at SK2!

    And no, I have no affiliation with SK2, other than being a very happy (and grateful) user.

    Rob

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  2. It is totally ironic that they don't have a simple way to stop comment spam, because like you said, even if you keep the 'rel="nofollow"' option intact, you've still got to delete the spam comment.

    I wouldn't be totally surprised either if these automated spammers have figured out a way to get past the captcha by now.

    As far as Akismet goes, I've sent a note to them via their contact us page about maybe setting up something for Blogger blogs. Maybe they'd be willing to do something like that if it were simple to do, or if they partnered with google for it...

    Sephyroth
    http://sephyroth.blogspot.com

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  3. I wish there was a way to penalize a web site, like adding an option similar to rel=nofollow but more like rel=abuser that tells the Google spider to reduce the juice of the web page in that link.

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  4. Hi, Added a new value to my blog thi... oh, nevermind

    Addison

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  5. Unfortunately I had to activate comment moderation and word verification (captcha), because it's hard to deal with so many spam comments. This is only temporary.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I don't allow comments on my blog. If someone wants to comment on one of my links, they can do it from their blog.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Programming and technology are not going to fix a human problem like this.

    I remember listening to an NPR story a few weeks ago about online roll-playing games and people who pay others (third world) to sit all day and mindlessly mine gold or tend fields to get PayPal money.

    Spammers will use these same concepts/services (Mechanical Turk comes to mind). The best we can do is use these same concepts/services to delete the spam.

    ReplyDelete
  8. This widget comment spam is popping up a lot lately. It seems to be a concerted and very annoying effort. I've seen it land on a blogger blog and a WP blog I run. It fooled Akismet.

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  9. I won't be at all surprised if you see some spam-filter come to Blogger comments in the near future, now that everyone is on the new platform.

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  10. The comment box should be treated similar to the email inbox in Gmail. In Gmail, Google has good measurements against spam (not perfect, but good). Added to that perhaps a manual whitelist and blacklist would be neat. This doesn't seem to be possible in Gmail either... sometimes even people I actively replied to several times are then ending up in the spam folder for a new mail of theirs...

    ReplyDelete
  11. I somehow have a http://www.anniyalogam.com/widgets/hackosphere.js

    hackosphere virus on my blog. Anybody that hits my blog gets a pop up and I can't figure out where the code is embedded (you can see it via view source)
    http://franklyrealty.blogspot.com

    HELP

    ReplyDelete
  12. Why would Google bother providing tools to clean comment-spam on Blogspot, when they don't first clean up Blogspot's own spamblogs in Google's own search results?
    http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?scoring=d&q=%22photoshop+warez%22

    ("Photoshop warez" is just one search term which happens to be in the nonsense-blog wordlists this week. All those numbered Blogspot splogs have nonsense text. Such ad-revenue and pagerank schemes serve to disorganize the world's information.)

    jd/adobe

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  13. I'he the same problem with a SPAM comment on my blog http://deal-news.blogspot.com/
    Can you show me the URL of plugin for blogspot blog?

    Alex Greg
    http://www.godeals.com

    ReplyDelete
  14. Blogger doesn't have support for plug-ins that could filter spam comments.

    ReplyDelete
  15. hi
    yes, when blogger is so strict on spam blogs then it should also have strictness of spam comments.

    also to say that spam posts can be created even when blogger asks for captcha in posts to verify this you can visit my blog and see that i have made 150 posts in a single day without entering any single captcha.

    http://celebrity-images-free.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete