Comment Spam – The War is Raging

Last night I was wandering through MyBlogLog and I happened upon Jessica Doyle’s blog.

Now I have to tell you that I am one of those folks who has a defective art appreciation gene. (I explained that whole thing a while back on my personal blog when I talked about art.)

And Jessica is an artist with an art blog, so I wouldn’t have thought I’d find something post worthy for SuccessCREEations over there. But this world is a funny place.

You see Jessica found herself face to face with a massive spam problem. And she chose to deal with it in a very creative way in her post SpamArt 001 – WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE – is it stealing.

Someone sent a massive spam comment to her blog that took her no less than 8 screen captures to copy. Sheesh!

Now it appears that not only are the spammers and spambots trying to overwhelm the internet with sheer numbers of their vile, worthless comments, now they are moving toward making each individual spam comment a massive beast on its own!

What is Spam?

For those of you who don’t know, there are literally millions of malicious comments spewing around the internet linking to mostly bogus web sites as unscrupulous creatures harvest quick cash through malicious means. I talked a little about comment spam in the Business 101 Series post on Comments.

To give you an idea of the scope of the problem take a look at this spam chart maintained by one of the leading anti-spam comment tools, Askimet.

According to this chart, about 93% of all comments posted on blogs are spam and not legitimate comments. The folks at Askimet call those legitimate comments ham. I like that.

But that means for every legitimate comment out there you can expect to get 14 bogus ones. And as you can see from the chart the problem is accelerating at a phenomenal rate. I’m not sure how long Askimet has been around, but I’m guessing their service has been active for a couple years or so. They say they’ve caught well over 400 million spams so far.

And today alone they’ve got over 3 million, and their statistical day is just over half way through with 11 hours to go.

Now I’m a fan of Askimet and use it on my blogs. They have their detractors. The major complaint I’ve heard is that they sometimes get some false positive readings.

A couple other effective blog tools I’ve seen highly recommended to help combat spam are Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2. I’ve not used either one, so if you have some experience with those (or any other solutions) let us know about it.

What’s my point?

The point is the blogging world is too dangerous a place anymore to wander into unprotected. And don’t think that because your blog isn’t getting any traffic yet you can avoid joining the fight.

I’ve neglected my personal blog as I work at getting my business up and running. I haven’t posted over there since 1 November and obviously I don’t get much traffic over there as a result.

Even so, in the last 24 hours CREEations has had well over 3,000 spam comments pouring in. Here at SuccessCREEations I generally see about 25 spam comments a day. Quite a difference.

Fortunately Askimet does a great job capturing all that junk so you don’t get subjected to it. And who wants to see comments hawking everything from handbags to pills to some really vile porn?

We’ve got to be equipped to defend ourselves from the onslaught of spam that is flooding in with ever increasing numbers every day. Fortunately there are tools out there like Askimet, Bad Behavior, and Spam Karma 2, to help us in our fight.

And fortunately there are some like Jessica who can add a little humor for us while we fight. Thanks Jessica for that.

NOTE: This post was lost during a catastrophic server failure and was reconstituted days later from an email feed copy. Let that be a lesson to you. Tech stuff breaks. Save early & save often. Back up you blog!