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Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

Security & Privacy

Spam and Vandals, part 2

Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 21 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

5 Oct 2003

A few weeks ago I compared spammers to graffitti artists. I was talking to John from Inluminent about comment spam. Most of his spam seemed to be hand-entered and all came on older entries.

Looking over one of the entries that recently was spammed, I noticed that in addition to the recent spam, it had a spam comment from one of the Zip Code sites. Searching Google for links to that same zip code site turns up a whole lot of blogs that have been spammed. Most of the entries that have been spammed were first hit by the Zip code spammer, which was probably an automated spam bot. Then they have several, sometimes even dozens of comments with spam links to other sites.

So it appears that I’m right. Spammers are searching for sites with links to other spammers and then leaving comments themselves.

My suggestion is to monitor your comments and delete spam comments immediately. This will help keep spammers away from your site. And if you have entries that are attracting lots of comment spam, disable comments for those entries. I closed comments for the entry here that’s been attracting the most spam, SimpleComments. I figure at this point if anyone has anything to say, they can contact me directly.

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