The joys of blog ownership
May 05
I have a test blog on this site. It wouldn’t be too difficult to find it if you really wanted to. There’s nothing on there but the latest version of WordPress and some sample comments and posts that I cut-and-pasted from my other writings. I use it to test out themes and whatnot.
I’ve never linked to it. I’ve never mentioned it here before.
I posted three entries to it at the end of January and haven’t touched it since. I noticed in my web stats this morning that there were 1400 hits to the blog, which (again) I’ve never mentioned nor linked to.
It’s all spam comments. Almost 1700 comments in total. I felt strong and powerful in deleting them all. Then, I disabled commenting and trackbacks from the blog. (Not this one, though, don’t worry.)
Let this be a lesson to you: There’s no such thing as a site that a spammer can’t find and screw up, if they so desire.
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Jun 13, 2006 @ 04:50:54
Hi – I had a similar problem with my main blog, and found that Wordpress Gatekeeper will really help your spam. it asks the user to answer a predefined question in order to post a comment.
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/wordpress/wp-gatekeeper.html
One thing though, it’s important to change the questions from time to time, as I’ve found some spammers will actually visit your blog first and try and post a comment and add the code into their spambot. However, it does cut down on the amount of spam in your ‘inbox’
Jun 13, 2006 @ 08:33:28
Not a bad concept, but I’m trying hard to avoid complicating the posting process any further. On the other hand, that other blog doesn’t get too many posters, so I’d only be putting two or three people out an extra three seconds of their lives to save me a massive headache every couple of weeks. Hmmm.
Thanks — I’m definitely going to look into this for the other blog. I think I just talked myself into it. heh