Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Meaty Subject

For the last month or so we have been receiving an increasing flow of automated comments on the blog, written in strangely stilted English, and attempting to point us to sites advertising all kinds of rubbish. We have already had to introduce pre-moderation of comments, but having to check the blog constantly and then delete up to a couple of dozen fake posts takes too much time, and that means that some kind of verification is going to be needed. That will inconvenience all genuine commenters, but that is, I am afraid, the way of the online world.  Sorry.

7 comments:

  1. Spam /mints/? What madness is this?

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    Replies
    1. Whereas some of us "eat ham and jam and spam a lot", others seem to prefer mints! My suspicion is that Mrs Bystander has advised her hubby to munch on a mint or two to mask the odour of all those glasses of good malt that he quaffs to cope with the travails of the blogosphere, including these tiresome spammers.
      P.S. One day someone will explain to me just what they hope to gain by these attacks. What is their purpose other than being bothersome?

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  2. So it's not just me then! Spam seems to have gone mad. On my blog I still allow 'free' comments for recent posts and then have moderation switched on if someone comments on an older post. But I am getting 20-30 spams a day and it's getting wearing.

    The "strangely stilted English" is the spam bot trying to avoid the spam filter by picking out words from your blog and composing English sentences with them. There's an arms race going on and the spammers are currently in the ascendant.

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  3. AnotherNorthernJP27 March 2013 at 11:32

    I can't help feeling that the spammers might be doing us all a favour. If some form of verification is needed it might reduce the number of comments from trolls on the blogs.

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  4. I am a blogger who has encountered exactly the same problem. I commented on this on the 'Blogger' webforum and this prompted a number of other bloggers to report similar problems.

    As Bystander says, it is an irritation, and Google (owners of Blogger/Blogspot) really need to address it.

    Bearing in mind the very large number of spam comments I am getting, I have begun to question how accurate the statistics on page views are. I reckon I would have to discount at least 5,000 page views a month (out of 40,000+ at present) to get a true view as to how many genuine visitors are accessing my own blog.

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  5. It's odd, isn't it, to think of the Python team forty-odd years ago recording that sketch with the menu and the Vikings and the word now having passed into the vocabulary of many languages with an utterly unrelated meaning - and a meaning which would have made no sense at the time?

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  6. Indeed I also have seen an increase in Mr Anonymous since Christmas. Around 20 a day!

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Posts are pre-moderated. Please bear with us if this takes a little time, but the number of bores and obsessives was getting out of hand, as were the fake comments advertising rubbish.