This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
Excerpt: Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated. We will hit you where it hurts by attacking your source of income. Read the whole article…
Bloggers, charge!
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey delivers the smackdown to comment spammers. I agree 100%. You fuckers are not welcome here and will be...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey: The Comment Spam Manifesto Read and link....
Count me in.
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has issued a Comment Spam Manifesto that declares War on Blog Comment Spammers. Read it, Link to it, and volunteer some time and skill. What you can do Sign the manifesto by linking to it, leaving a comment...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey says it: Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better ...
http://www.samspade.org/ has everything people need to track a comment spammer. whois to find the doamin owner traceroute for find hosting peers rdns to find hosts on shared hosting safe browser to check out all those framed re-directs. This is a pretty good example of the basics for email but all the IP and host stuff applies to comment spam too : http://www.stentorian.com/antispam/webpage.html
Excerpt: Beating: Joseph Duemer billed his comment spammer. Well done! :D Writings: Adam Kalsey has written a brief comment spam manifesto. I agree 100%! Just because anyone can fill in a form on a site and get their views out into he open with mine does not g...
To say you are the man Kalsey would be a huge understatement. Well said man. Glad someone finally stepped up and took it to these a$$holes.
Excerpt: Having been hit heavily this year by both bandwidth theft and comment spam I’ve thought at times about giving up my weblog hobby. Instead I learned how to be ruthless with possible bandwidth thieves and MT-Blacklist made the days of thirty spam c...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey declares war on comment spam, and he's right, comment spam is annoying, and it is time we fight back. Now, I don't have any problems yet with comment spam, because I haven't got any PR yet, but as...
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group
Excerpt: Comment Spam Let's recognize the problem before it gets an issue overhere in holland.
Excerpt: I'm joining the posse a bit late in the game but <sticking head out of window> "I sick and tired of it and won't take any more!!" What am I...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has declared war on the comment spammers. Not only should we protect ourselves and our blogs from the...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has declared war on the comment spammers. Not only should we protect ourselves and our blogs from the...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey wants you to sign his manifesto against comment spam. If having people post unwarranted links to pornographic sites, or linking to viagra stores annoys you, then add your name to it.
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has had enough comment spam, and he's doing something about it. Is hoping something is not wishful thinking an example of wishful thinking? <brain implodes>
Excerpt: I like Adam Kalsey's "Comment Spam Manifesto" and as he suggested, I'm pinging it and therefore doing my part to spread the word. Not much more to add to what he's said other than "Amen."...
Excerpt: The resistance is taking shape, Adam Kalsey is leading the way with a Comment Spam Manifesto aiming to start a movement to put an end to the scum of the...
When I get hit by a spammer, I run their IP through this site: http://www.arin.net/whois/ Then contact whatever ISP is listed, including every bit of information I have on the idiot. Including the fact I traced their IP through that above site. So far so good.. 15 or so spammers down the flusher! :)
Excerpt: Don't these people have a life? It seems like an awful lot of work to go site to site posting stuff. Maybe I'm just more lazy than the average spammer, since I don't take the time to comment on even my favorite blogs very often *laughs*
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has issued a Comment Spam Manifesto: Bloggers will track you down and notify your hosting providers about your activities. We will tell your ISPs what you are using their connections for. We will let the makers of the...
Well said. I've suffered way too much comment spam recently. Jay Allen's work has made things considerably better, but it still didn't stop me wanting to wring the neck of the guy who spammed his "Lolita" ads all over the obituary I wrote for my grandfather. However: "If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated." I don't entirely agree with this, as it makes no mention of relevancy. For example: Kevin Ball's comment on my Chandler piece ( http://cheerleader.yoz.com/archives/000141.html ) is clearly an advertisement for his product, but it's not spam because it's also relevant to the piece's subject matter. At least, *I* consider it relevant, and I have the final say on which comments on my own blog are considered spam and which are not. (I've had a bunch of other comments which I considered spam even though the text of the comment made mention of the blog entry's subject matter - the mention was only cursory, and the main aim of the comment was clearly not to comment for the sake of a comment but to link, via the URL entry, to a commercial website.) This may seem pedantic but it's key: This is an absolutist, us-versus-them manifesto, and as such we need to be clear about who "they" are. IMHO, the definition is spread just a tiny bit too wide. Many blogs have a commercial/industry basis (particularly the technology industry). As grating as advertising can be, I would hate to see anyone punished for merely mentioning their own product in a conversation.
Excerpt: Curiously enough, right after I installed MT-Blacklist and posted an entry regarding comment spam, I came across the Comment Spam M...
Yoz: But you are agreeing with me. You say it is spam if "the main aim of the comment was clearly not to comment for the sake of a comment but to link." Kevin Ball's comment is clearly a comment about your entry. It is not ad advertisement, but instead an intelligent comment with a solution to th problem you describe in your entry. The fact that the solution proposed is made by the company he works for does not make it an advertisement. My point is that if that if a comment is placed purely to advertise a product or service, it is spam. The motivation of the commenter and whether the comment adds value is the key. It really depens on context. Take http://kalsey.com/2003/10/personal_firewall_advantages/ for example. A firewall vendor sending a ping or a placing a comment that was simply a link to their product would be spam. A vendor sending a ping or comment linking to an article that addressed specifically the advantagees of firewalls over NAT would be welcome. If you add something useful to the conversation, it isn't likely that anyone will see it as spam. And that's part of the problem with spam. It's like pornography. You can't define it, but you know it when you see it.
On reflection, you can define spam. The one thing that distinquishes spam from non-spam is the repeated nature of spam. Non-spam is an attempt to have a conversation with its recipient. Spam makes no such attempt. It is broadcast indiscriminantly. There is no concern about who receives it, reads it, or uses the information it contains. And that's what is fundamentally different about Kevin Ball's comment on Yoz's blog or my hypothetical firewall comment.
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey is drawing a line in the sand and declaring war on comment spammers. He has put up a Comment Spam Manifesto, to spread the word in the blog community and to put spammers on notice. Read it. ...
Excerpt: Comment Spam sucks. MT-Blacklist is a superb start in the fight, but we're not going to beat them with technology alone. Go read Adam Kalsey's Comment Spam Manifesto and his story of revenge on spammers. I couldn't agree with him...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey is forming a posse to go after comment spammers. He has written a manifesto declaring comment spammers personae non gratae in the blogosphere and invites us all to sign the manifesto by commenting on his blog or sending a trackback ping, an...
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto - Adam Kalsey urges people to take on the comment spammers. Couldn't agree more. If you have...
Excerpt: Just read the Comment Spam Manifesto and I have to agree 100%.
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has declared war on comment spam. I'm gonna be a footsoldier. I already get three hundred spams a day in email. My spam filter catches most of them (and often, takes a couple valid emails along with them)....
As with email, there is probably no solution beyond a technical one. While Anil's actions are pragmatic they will likely be too little to halt the onslaught of comment spam that is likely to ensue. Luckily MT is a smaller target for spam, with an even lower gain per duped user. Periodic spam prevention updates by Six Apart and/or third parties should keep the problem down to a dull roar. Trackback spam, on the other hand, is going be a problem. Enabling Trackback is a public invitation to "ping" with a reference to related material. How closely does the material have to match the blog entry? Can it be commercial? Can a Tivo dealer trackback a PVRBlog review of a certain model?
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has declared war on comment spammers. By way of this entry, I sign the manifesto and join him...
Let's make the spammers TAKE IT BACK~! I'm not popular enough yet for comment spam, but it does irritate me on others sites. Take it back, Spammers!
Excerpt: Comment spam sucks soooo fkin much. Why should I have to have spam to some teen porn site on my...
Excerpt: Usenet news succumbed to spam long ago. Email was next. Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment...
Excerpt: There is a surge in posts about comment spam, and this vitality is a good sign as long as solutions...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey posts the manifesto, FFG supports it. The Whoop-Ass can is open.
Now that's an interesting development. Someone with too much spare time ping-spammed this entry with a half dozen commercial posts advertising MY services. Of course they spelled my name wrong and advertised services I don't provide, but it's interesting nonetheless. I'm wondering if their intention was malicious or was intended as a satire. If it was a satire, it would be great if whoever did it would let me know. It was a clever idea and I'd love to chat with you about your thoughts on the matter.
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey: "Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will
I'm not letting spammers ruin my site. Well said, Adam!
Consider me signed.
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto: "Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and...
Excerpt: In an effort to rid the blogging world of spam, many bloggers are raising arms and telling the spammers to leave us the hell alone. One way to do so is to sign the manifesto. I will do my part......
well, i "signed" the manifesto, but my trackback didn't work... so.. let it be written! Let it be done!
What happens if a competitor "spams" on your behalf? You would get the backlash, not them.
Excerpt: The topic about comment spam still rages, with people following the spammer's tracks to shut them down or at a minimum harrass them with bills and whatnot. The spammers then come back with, "It's all legal, your comment forms are open." Well, yes and n...
a fine manifesto. here here.
I think it's unlikely that a competitor would attempt to publicize your Web site for you. Any negative effect would be offset by the positives that spammers hope to gain in the first place. And there's no guarantee that it would work anyway. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that "Peter" is the spammer who is the subject of http://kalsey.com/2003/11/spam_talk/ . If not it's a rather large coincidence that he's using the same ISP as our friend.
Count me in, Adam!
Excerpt: Die, fuckers, die!...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey is pissed about comment spam and isn't content to just block it: Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey is fed up with the spam that his website receives on a daily basis. How can a website receive spam, you ask? Well it's simple--people leave comments for the sole purpose of getting their link out there. His...
Count me in, too! I'm tired of getting comment spam.
Excerpt: The masses are stirring, provoked by the likes of Adam Kalsey, Jeremy Wright and Jay Allen's MT Blacklist plugin. Junk mail in my mailbox is already a PITA. Spam in my email is even more of a PITA. At least...
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the...
Viagra viagra viagra! Now available 33% off! ACT NOW! I'm just foolin'. Here here, huzzah huzzah, etc.
Excerpt: Spammers are on notice....
Excerpt: Amen Adam Kalsey! We must fight comment spammers and their efforts to take over our websites. We must all work...
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto by Adam Kalsey. (everyone is linking to this but what the heck.) On the same subject, I've been using Knowspam to manage email spam for a bit more than a month now and am very happy. See...
Excerpt: I signed Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group. I personally was about to try MT-Blacklist. Up to now, this plugin for Movable Type use a text file such as blacklist.txt. I think we could share our blacklist files with...
Excerpt: A movement has been born, and bloggers world wide are uniting under the banner of the Kalsey Consulting Group Blog to tackle head on the evil that is Blog spammers and their insidious spam. Or so the story should go!....
Excerpt: The Comment Spam Manifesto is a good start, but before webloggers start slinging the heavy artillery, a freely distributed policy needs to be documented.
Excerpt: Spam. I'm sick of it. I wish I didn't have to hide my email address in public forums, especially weblog comments. My email address is forever tarnished because of spam. TypePad is supposedly fairly secure from spammers and their bots,
Excerpt: Continuing the effort to fight against comment spam in this blog, I just installed, configured and tested the anti-comment-spam filter...
Excerpt: The spammers may have picked a fight with the wrong kids in the schoolyard....
Yes! Let's get these lowlifes. Good work, Adam. I have linked to it from my blog and from thefeature.com: http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/001993.html http://www.thefeature.com/user/howard/journalentry?id=239
I fully support the fight. Spammers have made my email almost un usable. Fight on!
I agree, spammers have messed with the wrong group of people. May I suggest a collaborative blog detailing weblogger's efforts and techniques to fight blog comment spam?
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto "Posting an email address in a public place is not an invitation for companies to send unsolicited...
my new email address has been spammed, in three days! they work hard harvesting our addresses out there! keep up the fight. David.
I agree. I hate spammers
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group. bye comment spammers. I hope you enjoyed it, while it lasted. Now to...
Excerpt: If my kid had to grow up and be a spammer or a thief, I'd rather he be a thief. Adam Kalsey writes an angry...
Thank you very much...I guess we still have to answer the phone at dinner time but I'll pass it on to spanish blogs to help some how!
Hear, Hear!
Excerpt: Although the offenses in question have more or less confined themselves to entries farther down the homepage, I've been getting spammed a few times a week, on my own website! However, it seems that i'm not the only one, and...
I'm almost spectacularly web-ignorant, but I've managed to run a few things down with Sam Spade, which is a pretty stunning endorsement.
> Bloggers will track you down and notify your hosting providers about your activities. Does anyone have a good procedure documented for helping people do this fairly painlessly? Samspade is a start, but what steps have people taken to stick it back to spammers through tracing back and reporting?
You guys might want to look at the Make Money Fast Hall of Humiliation: It'a a site that's been around since 1996 (I know, I was a paying member there for a while), and has been dealing with spammers and scammers for that whole time. The current URL is: http://www.mmfhoh.org.
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto "Posting an email address in a public place is not an invitation for companies to send unsolicited...
I've thought about creating an "advertising rates" page for my web site, then posting a link next to the comment box. Anybody have a boilerplate template for such a thing?
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has produced The Comment Spam Manifesto. I'm lucky enough to be a very small fish in a big sea and only receive 2 to 3 comment spams per week. However, I for one wholeheartedly endorse his call to...
Excerpt: Spam (not the ham product) is the lowest for of \
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey tells comment spammers they'll be hunted down in his comment spam manifesto. Good for him, and since bloggers are a little more net savvy than the average email recipient, it might work. Sign me up to help hunt...
Excerpt: The clearinghouse for stuff related to Jay Allen's comment spam disabler is here. Note that you can submit spams you've...
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto We aren't going down without a fight....
Unfortunately spammers are turning more and more to trojans and open proxies as a way to mask their true locations. It's very likely that the IP address recorded with the comment is just an infected home PC. Of course open proxies need to be shut down anyway, but that doesn't hurt the spammers.
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group Declaring war on our wonderful comment spammers. You can join in by linking to the above post and sending a trackback ping. I will also add this link to my blogroll. Let's get...
Excerpt: Count me in against the fight of comment spam. So far I haven’t had to much comment spam, thanks in part to the MT-Blacklist plugin. When I do get any in the future, phear me spammers....
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group "Declaring war on our wonderful comment spammers. You can join in by linking to the above post and sending a trackback ping. I will also add this link to my blogroll." What Jane...
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto Whether this will do any good, I have no idea, but anything is worth a shot!...
Excerpt: "Here here!" to Adam Kalsey's Comment Spam Manifesto. Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with,...
Getting sick of bots spamming forms, I developed a freeware service called BotBlock that lets anyone use image-verification on web forms with almost no coding. Feel free to check it out and spread the word: http://chime.tv/products/botblock.shtml Currently only works with PHP. I am in the process of porting it to Perl and ASP.
Excerpt: Upon reading up on comment spam (and actually getting a few myself), I had an idea for SixApart. We can block IP addresses from posting comments in TypePad's admin interface, and for all spam comments I have received, that's what
It seems trackback isn't working for me, so I'm leaving a comment to show where it should have been.
Excerpt: Link and fight Comment Spammers! Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey provides the rallying cry to in his Comment Spam Manifesto. Also check out Adam's story of nailing a blog spam roach where it hurts. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and...
Excerpt: Comment spam will not be tolerated.
I fully support this manifesto, having recently written an essay along similar lines. http://www.crystalflame.net/2003/10/thousand_monkey.html
Excerpt: A common thread between the most effective forms of online advertising is the introduction of a hyperlink to a targeted user. In this respect, there is no difference between Google text ads, Orbitz pop-ups, and DoubleClick banner ads: for the advertise...
I don't think I get comment spam on the scale you guys seem to have but I'm curious, are you guys rejecting MT Blacklist in favor of a vigilante work? It appears so because although I haven't been hit by much comment spam, I installed MT Blacklist and it stopped EVERY single attempt, which has been about 15 so far. I think it will go away if people install this and other tools that will eventually be developed (one that doesn't send a notice for every single attempt and instead auto blocks IPs that make too many consecutive posts too quickly is sorely needed). I'm in no way condoning the activities of spammers but to me spending a lot of time 'fighting' this is just like those people you read about, sitting by their inbox, salivating while waiting for spam just to have a chance at tracking down the originators, instead of just getting a good filter and moving on with life. Creepy hobby, no?
Kiko: Not at all. The Blacklist plugin works great. But only for now, for MT, and for the current style of spam. The nature of comment spam will change and it will be harder to filter. There are very good filters for email spam, yet the spammers haven't gone away. They are getting more and more obnoxious, trying to beat the filters. And often they do. It's best to make sure that spammers find blogs a harsh environment to begin with. Don't let them gain a foothold.
DIE DIE DIE comment spammers!
Excerpt: Tired of spam comments? I certainly am. And so is Adam Kalsey, who has just penned the Comment Spam Manifesto. So, for those of you that are comfortable with the size of your privates, don't need viagra and prefer to...
Excerpt: I hate spam and I hate the spammers who spam. We all get those unwanted emails asking us to visit a site that will make us men harder, longer and more brilliant than Einstein or for women, bigger breasts than...
Excerpt: Man, don't you hate those fuckers? I have been getting more and more spam in my comments and would like...
Great call. Frankly it may be quite fun for more technically touched bloggers to figure out ways of making spam expensive to spammers. Often wondered about this, but one simple but rarely discussed option is how our actions to combat spam evolve craftier and ever sillier spamming techniques. Blacklists works but nothing stops the spammer connecting again in another way or via another ISP (or same ISP with a new "identity"). Filters work, but in a limited way. The best way to get the spammer is via the law, no? A common cause front may put them off. Someone design a logo saying "We Kill Spammers, DEAD" and this gets featured on subscribed linked commented sites, with a link to a site that claims to be able to track, hunt, and destroy anyone who posts the same message to every member of the group will mean that the group's "sentinel" may use the established resources of all members to identify and bring a class action suit against the individual or company spamming them. They may then go quiet. If not, carry out the threat a few times.
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey reports he got an ISP to kick off a Weblog spammer - and now the spammer is threatening the same thing in reverse. This comes a day after Kalsey posted a Comment Spam Manifesto ...
Excerpt: As those of you who have blogs (and those of you who read them) are aware, spammers have graduated from learning how to send email to figuring out how to post comments as well. Poor Luke was lamenting recently on...
Excerpt: As those of you who have blogs (and those of you who read them) are aware, spammers have graduated from learning how to send email to figuring out how to post comments as well. Poor Luke was lamenting recently on...
Excerpt: I found out about this Comment Spam Manifesto. If you've had this problem, go check it out. There's a lot of useful info in the comments too.
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has channeled his anti-spam rhetoric into a declaration of war in his Comment Spam Manifesto. While it's not quite the we'll scour the earth in pursuit of you, smoke you out of your holes and serve you up a good beating that I would have th...
Excerpt: Reading Comment Spam Manifesto (good, impassioned piece), so soon after my Spam posting moved me to think on this a...
> Blacklists works but nothing stops the spammer > connecting again in another way or via another > ISP (or same ISP with a new "identity"). Not all blacklists, blacklist IP addresses...
Oh I'm all over this one. Here's my contribution: http://www.djmischiff.com/blog/archives/001241.html#001241 Also- a few of us think we might have a pretty solid solution that works proactively. I'll post back if we can make it work. Keep up the good fight!
I had to close down one email to "strangers" (people not on my safe-list) because I got literally thousands of emails with huge attachments. Next, I had to close down a public forum (and restrict it to a single place to post comments) because I got weekly spam in it. It's really bad. If Google finds out how to filter stuff like this, possibly even to ban sites using that scheme, we would all be better off.
I took the freedom to adapt this manifesto to the website of the upcoming "blam" project. In other words: I, on behalf of the project, hereby sign this manifest. The blam project targets blog comment spamming. Its goal is to create a pseudo-standard API (along with a reference implementation) to help managing blacklists and help building a web-of-trust for blacklist distribution. It will try to be as independant from any blogging solution as possible, to be usable by hopefully everyone who runs his own blog with tools like Movable Type, WordPress, b2 and so on. Any help appreciated. Feel free to visit the project website to get more information: http://blam.sourceforge.net Thanks to Adam for taking the challenge and being one of the heads in the fight against blog spammers.
Excerpt: Via Mike Wendland: While I do not have many problems with comment spam (knocking on wood), the e-mail spam I get is enough to get me on Adam Kalsey's bandwagon. Check out the Comment Spam Manifesto.
Excerpt: This post is nothing more than a way to TrackBack Ping (i.e., sign) Adam Kalsey' Comment Spam Manifesto. Read it and find out why... I'm beginning my own campaign on this subject as well (even though I don't really know...
Consider this to be MY SIGNATURE supporting this manifesto. The sooner we cut off the paths for these damnable spammers, the better! This is worse than the fight for phone number portability in the cell phone industry. Keep fighting the good fight!
Excerpt: This is my declaration of war against comment spammers. And my call-to-arms for anyone who shares my opinion: join the blam project and support the fight against blog spam.
I wonder what life would be like if we were pro spam? :-)
Excerpt: This post addresses a particularly annoying (and growing) problem- blog-comment spam. Adam Kalsey has declared war on the spammers. Follow the link to see how you can help....
Excerpt: This post addresses a particularly annoying (and growing) problem- blog-comment spam. Adam Kalsey has declared war on the spammers. Follow the link to see how you can help....
Those who don't learn from history is bounded to repeat the same mistake. To think we can "do" something to these spammers because we are "technically superior" is laughable. Thousands of more competent engineers fighting email spammers and we have not succeed.
Excerpt: I just checked my e-mail only to find I had six new comments on my blog. Six! In the last hour! What is it I...
Adam Kalsey has hit the nail on the head with his manifesto. What is it going to take to win this war against spam and pop-ups? Everyone needs to follow the link to see how we can help.
I read about what you all have said in the newspaper. I agree completly. These spammers need to keep their filth to themselves. Im only 16, and my site isnt business or anything, but some people have told me that they are getting un wanted pop ups when they go to my site. I dont know how, but its really become an irritation. Im glad someone is finally doing something thats really going to make a difference.
Excerpt: Kleines Nebenergebnis meines BLAM-Besuches, wahrscheinlich hat das Jeder schon gekannt, nur ich nicht: Adam Kelseys CommentSpamManifestoy.
Yeah! Whatever he said!
Since my e-mail sites now have spam blockers, I am amazed at how many messages are "caught" each day. I still have to go in to this pile (like sifting through my garbage) and determine if some are "worthy" or my attention because any new correspondence gets caught. It is highly annoying, but not as annoying as the pop-ups and cookies that get attached to links and then take on a life of their own.
Isn’t the bloggin community making too much noise about the comment spam and possible entering into an impractical solution with the much touted black list and email confirmation schemes? How about something along these lines? After the commenter writes the post, in the preview stage, generate an image (difficult to OCR) with numbers and letters (like some banks do). Before committing, the commenter has to copy the generated letter and numbers. That will certainly kill all the spam bots Ubaldo Huerta http://foro.loquo.com
The image technique is called a captcha. They are difficult for machines to understand and impossible for the blind to understand. They completely kill accessibility. They also do nothing to prevent real humans from submitting spam comments, which is what is happening right now. It is a mistake to assume that spam is created by automated bots. The evidence I have here says it is not, but is typed into the forms by humans.
Adam's comments are rock solid. Spammers of all kinds are every bit as filthy as those maggots who thow their trash out of car windows. A long stay in hell to all of them!
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group I haven't really had any problems with comment spamming but the best defense...
Excerpt: Current anti-blogspam measures focus on keeping spam out of weblogs. I'm beginning to wonder if this is the correct approach. Why? Because this only provides incentive for the spammers to spam even more. I would guess a lot of blogspam currently goes u...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey came up with a great idea to combat the stupid ads that keep showing up in droves within
Excerpt: I'm not sure that it will do any good, but I like the way this guy thinks and I'm glad he's gotten others on board. Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments...
Excerpt: I know the Comment Spam Manifesto is a couple weeks old now, but I only came across it today... Actually, the only reason I came across it at all is I got comment spammed again (only second time in under...
Adam, please check out http://www.theconnexion.net/cgi-bin/blogwiki.pl?Comment_spam and let me know if there's anything I can add.
super post! i'm so tired of the clutter and excess clicks caused by this junk. I'm quite serious about dis-enabling institutions that promulgate, promote or distribute spam, or institutions that underwrite same. let's do it kurt
I think comment-spam is going to require a very different approach from email spam. For email, known-spam-blockers work, because the fundamental quality of spam is that it's sent to LOTS of people. Brightmail claims 2 million mailboxes catching spam, and they're pretty good at it. (I need to update the article on known-spam-blockers on my site since I realized they're the outfit I was praising.) Challenges (e.g., captchas) don't work for email, at least if you're a business, because you're terribly afraid of making it hard for a customer or prospect to reach you. Whitelists are too much trouble. And blacklists have never worked, because the spammers stay one step ahead. For comment spam, however, the argument against challenges doesn't apply. That's a good thing, because the argument for known-spam-blockers doesn't apply either, whitelists are still too much work, and blacklists are subject to the same problem as they are in email.
Agreed.
I sincerely support any efforts against comment spam. Blogs are getting more important, so eventually spam on them will get correspondingly more irritating, frustrating, and wasteful of time and money.
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey is fed up with the spam that his website receives on a daily basis. How can a website receive spam, you ask? Well it's simple---people leave comments for the sole purpose of getting their link out there. His...
After countless attempts at sending a trackback ping to this posting, I've given up. It's odd that I can't ping this place, as I can ping any other MT site. Anyhow, here's my showing of support: http://speed.insane.com/archives/2003/11/10/ending_comment_spam.php
Excerpt: Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group Adam Kalsey on Comment Spam and how the blogger community can and will
This is funny - the post where I trackback to this article (on my site), is the post that gets the most referal spam of my entire site. (ironic innit?)
Excerpt: Spammers have long been the scourge of the Internet. It's hard to say whether they started first with email or with USENET's NNTP-protocol-based newsgroups. The newsgroups are now virtually an historical artifact, due in no small part to spammers. And...
Excerpt: Through Tom's Interdependent Thoughts where he talks about his recent installation of MT-Blacklist, I found this: Comment Spam Manifesto :: Kalsey Consulting Group And through trackback, I sign it. Bring it on. :P...
Excerpt: Right, that's it! I've finally had it up to here with bloody comment spam! I REALLY ought to have done something about this months ago, but on receiving one final penis-pills link telling me that they thought my site was...
Thanks for your stance on comment spam. I just began using the SpamX filter plugin for comment spam on my Geeklog website, Caveserv. I'll lend assistance to tracking down comment spammers as I despise this and all other spam.
Excerpt: The Alchemist has been using shady tactics to promote his "1st Infrantry" album. Either himself or one of his pr people are spamming my site and J Smooth's site and others by posting a link to his album in our
Excerpt: I have added functionality to stop the onslaught of comment spaming with a nifty PHP script call MT-Blacklistupdater. I was forced to let the hammer down as they, the spamers, are really flooding blogs with their crap to raise their...
I completely agree with you and I wish I could flood their mail boxs with spam of my own. Dave
Excerpt: If you poke around my site you'll see some spam messages with random ass text that has links to party-poker. A few days ago I got a few messages from an ip address which I traced to an isp calledatrvio. So I politely asked them to take care of the s...
I abhore and totally detest spam! I do everything that I can to stop spam. I use Roadrunner's spam filters to keep spam at bay. Chrissy Johnson chrisjhnsn@houston.rr.com
I really do think these spammers should not be getting a free ride at the expense of others...many sites charge to provide ad space...they shouldn't be allowed not to. I really think some should make a law that if someone spams someone's blog they should be required to pay a few to the blogger.
Yes I will post a link to this article on Comment Spam. I am working on my own article on this topic for my Vaspers the Grate web usability enhancement blog. The difference between promoting your blog on other blogs and discussion forums...and comment spam...is? I'm trying to pin this down. Comment spam is really annoying me lately, and I agree, let's fight back aggressively. The Artforum Talkback forum is loaded with comment spam, thus ruining it's value, and I want to help this fine art magazine online to defeat these scumbuckets. Steven Streight aka Vaspers the Grate
I agree 100%, it's time for some serious action. Anything within the boundaries of the law. (I have hundreds of spam messages coming in on my WordPress based blog daily, some more while typing this...)
Way to go. My full-blown article on this topic "Comment Spammers: Internet Pigs and How They Feed" is now online: http://vaspersthegrate.blogspot.com/2004/10/comment-spammmers-internet-pigs-and-how.html I pull together the threads by Mark Pilgrim, Photo Matt, Joi Ito, you, Dave Winer, Steven Berlin (Wired.com), Elise.com, Jay Allen, Amy Gahran, and me Vaspers the Grate. I've also submitted my article to the EServer Tech Communications Library hosted by Iowa State University, and am now preparing a report that is sent to all my clients and allies, including Jakob Nielsen and B.J. Fogg, PhD, Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.
Kill'em all! These comment spams are intoreable. I have tried a few solutions, but now I willing to shut them down! No more 'Teen Rape' ad's or 'Viagra- cheap' on my website! Thanks for your post!
It takes a certain amount of courage to join battle with the purveyors of spam. There are those out there who take a very pesemistic view of these developments and predict dire consequences for those who oppose. What measures are you taking to ensure that this blog is not subject to comment spam? I suspect that you will soon be targeted, but I am curious as to how you intend on responding.
Excerpt: [[image:spamcp.jpg]]First they took usenet... then they took your inbox and now they're taking your weblog. Spammers are everywhere, in even the tiniest corners of the internet we are confronted with the same stuff over and over again. Viagra, Phenterm...
Excerpt: [[image:stopspam.png:Stop Spam!]]Having been annoyed to death by comment-spamming on my other (MT-based) blog kontverhaal.com I was already fearing the worst for this site for the future since Pivot doesn't have any protection against comment spammers....
Excerpt: [[image:stopspam.png:Stop Spam!]]Having been annoyed to death by comment-spamming on my other (MT-based) blog kontverhaal.com I was already fearing the worst for this site for the future since Pivot doesn't have any protection against comment spammers....
Excerpt: Sometimes I wonder how on earth spammers manage to stay in business. Are there people out there who actually click on the links and buy stuff? If so, those people should seriously be punished in some way. Paul's blog is starting to get comment spam,...
Excerpt: It seems my blog has finally been accepted into the official blog ranks. No longer am I just some loser who occasionaly writes whitty remarks on some obscure site. Thats right I've finally gotten my first batch of Comment Spam. YAY! ^_^ My oldest...
Victory over Spammers. I was getting 150 comment spams a day. I started looking for my options to fight it. I found this sight and others. I'm not that smart on MT or HTML yet, so I was having trouble implementing things like James Seng's MT Plug in, or MT Blacklist. on the Dec. 2nd i posted a warning to spammers on my site. In it I said the plug ins were coming and that I was participating in Comment Spam Manifesto. I am still hesitant to say that this is what took the spams from 150 a day to 3 the first day and 0 the second day, but I haven't done anything to the site. I think they fear the tactics of this Manifesto.
Excerpt:
Our website has been targeted we can only guess by our competition to list us in comment spam blacklists. How do we get off them?
Spam sucks! Don't ever send me spam! I will complain to your ISP. I don't tolerate that sort of thing! Chris Johnson chrisjhnsn@houston.rr.com
Spammers wore me down until I finally shut down my personal blog. Now the WordPress is so easy to use I'm taking measures to block spam before allowing comments. Thanks for spreading the word. I will too!
As a victim of email spamming who has fortunately so far been spared from comment spam, I heartily agree. Let us blacklist the IPs and the sites they advertise. If an ISP refuses to take action, the IPs can always be mass-banned from all sites. If the IPs are not static, it will soon make it inevitable for ISPs to stop their spamming customers, because their users otherwise lose access to a large section of the web. And as for the sites that are advertised... they want traffic? They can have traffic... lots of it...
Excerpt: "just like everything else, the weblogging community seems intent on (a) thinking they’re special and unique and nobody has ever had their problems before, and proceeding to (b) ignore all the work that has come before and reinventing the wheel."
I use a combination of techniques to stop comment spams 100% on my WordPress based java blog at http://blog.taragana.com/. Here's my recipe - http://blog.taragana.com/index.php?p=128 However there is still the open issue of reducing the load on my server by their futile brain-dead attempts. I am hoping that they will soon wisen up. Blocking IP is not a good solution as they are definitely using hijacked machines, looking at the number of different IP addresses the spams are originating from. I believe this can be best achieved by going after the advertisers.
I believe there are several ways to bring all spammers to justice and fast. One way includes people putting together a botnetwork where a volunteer group goes looking around at blogs that have been known for getting tons of comment spam, getting the dirt on the company, and knock them off the internet. You knock a company off the interenet every time they start spamming, and send them warnings, I think there is a possibility they might start listening. Another possible solution is to use those graphical keys that bots can't use yet to combat spam, so each time a person wants to send a comment they must first put in that key. This would slow them down quite a bit. The last solution (which probably would never happen) is to go to the doors of these companies, walk in, and pull the plug on everything. I mean power, phones, delete all computer records and replace it with a bunch of illegal software, and then tell the cops and watch as they raid the place and get sued by microsoft, the riaa, mpaa, and just about every other possible group :)
One other thing I forgot to mention - lets pressure the media into creating a mass panic that viagra and those other herbal ingredients are in some way totally harmful to your body. They are very good at it. Hell, even the president can do it... "Today I am issuing a blanket alert. We not quite sure what the threat is, or where it will hit us, but we know it's there..." I'm sure there's something like this we can do. Imagine the pending lawsuits that would happen
Excerpt: Just thought I'd join in the effort ;)
Excerpt: If you host any ammount of email on your network your going to want to look into the baracuda spam blocker. This bad boy is loaded with features, and we've tested it to the max. You have the option of using every black list out there, or even train you...
Excerpt:
Excerpt: Over the past few months I have received on this site, and on another blog of mine Mad About Madrid, a huge amount of comment and trackback spam. Comment spam is a technique used by certain webmasters and owners of
Excerpt: The past few days have seen my sites swamped under a deluge of spam - mainly comment spam, with a little of the referrer variety thrown in for good measure. Despite the rare appearance of January sun today, it was...
no idea what we can do about all that spammers. agree with the manifesto. best wishes
Excerpt: from Emil Kacperski and crew. Googling will turn up lots of stuff on him. Seems he is local, somewhere in the east bay.
I've had to turn commenting off it got so bad - I havn't got the time to keep deleting it. Is there some semi-automated verification feature I can use to verify and/or block users from commenting?
Excerpt: Email sent to google follows: To whom it may concern at Google, My name is Marco van Hylckama Vlieg. I am the creator of a piece of software I wish I was never 'forced' to create. It serves no purpose, it doesn't make the internet any better, it ...
Three rules for the spam game: 1) you can not win. 2) you can not draw. 3) you can not leave the play. Greetings, Antonio, from Malaga (Spain)
Excerpt: I'm sure everyone is familiar with email spam. Recently, I have been swamped with spam placed in my Comments section. It seems if any technology exists to allow for rapid, free advertisement it will be abused by malicious scammers. Almost...
I'm down with this - death to comment spammers!
Why don't you use the new 'nofollow' attribute? http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html Search engine spiders will not follow the links within the 'nofollow' section thus making the comments redundant. As this attribute becomes more popular, comment spam should decrease. North Face.
Hello, We really appreciate the fight you have started against the spam of comments.
No argument from me on this, but there are a lot of bloggers who aren't really techies, so as long spammers can spam these sites and get away with it they still have a lot of leverage. Of course with Google's nofollow thing most spam comments are becoming useless now :D
As a recent victim of comment spam, count me in the posse. A so-called "therapist" posted a completely irresponsible throw-away comment on THREE of my blogs (including two she obviously didn't know I moderate!) and used the author name block to say "Click here and get better therapy than this blogger does" (of all the freakin' asinine arrogance!). Egregiously self-promoting is considered highly unethical in the therapy community. I decided to fight back and found your Manifesto. Rock on! And Thanks.
Spammers and hijackers are criminals, bec they steel others computers and money. I want to spend some money for buying some killers for them. It is too less dangerous to spam or to profit out of spam. Who want earn some money for a good job? I have already some target sites.
Excerpt: It’s amazing how much comment spam is directed at my site, although I’m sure the amount of spam directed at my site is modest compared to others. I don’t know why the spammers keep it up, since I don’t even notice it until I ch...
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has post what I have been wanting to say since I got my first comment post of spam Posting an email address in a public place is not an invitation for companies to send unsolicited advertisements. Hosting a public Web forum or Usenet ser...
I am very mad about the way some spammers have been using my site and posting very stupid info and links that don't even work properly. The spam manifesto sounds great,when I read it it was all what I wish to say to those who believe they can abuse a site and go there and spam when there is nobody (basically at night),nobody has the right for using other people's sites,blogs and places where art,articles are written with a purpose,especially if those sites/blogs are for helping disabled people,or people suffering any kind of disease. Sometimes the owners of sites would like to open a site/forum to all public,even allowing a few anonymous readers to express an opinion if they want to share,but with all the spammers,using the comments sections for adding stupid comments/or unuseful links,it's really what make us the owners of a site/blog or forum make those places private,just for "logged in" users. Spammers should be punished as criminals,they are criminals that act without respect.
I believe "spam that pollutes the blogosphere" should be referred to as "SMOG"....... Jim Parham ~ Yuba City, CA stockmaverick@gmail.com
Well put. Our sites belong to us, and we won't be overrun by jerks.
Signing the manifesto on behalf of the Ark Linux team -- that *****ing spammer that defaced or forums with his crap will get what he deserves.
Death to comment spammers! Well, perhaps just maiming. At very least a serious spanking, and no 'net privileges for at least a month.
Amen brother. Comment spam really pisses me off. Decent Marketing joins your manifesto.
What I have not is not advertising spam, but script generated nuisance spam, hundreds of them. Given the broad range IP addresses broadcasting the same stuff, these are coming from workstations infested with trojan software. This is where a lot of email spam comes from too.
Damn straight, and well put. I'll link to your post from my blog, probably later today. Just had (another) spammer from China come visit this morning.. I've contacted the host of the main company he is promoting.. will wait and see what happens. Here's the blog post where I 'exposed' him, and swore at him in Mandarin I got off some website! (One of the swears is "son of rabbit!") heh. http://nrg78.com/ipw-web/b2/index.php?p=150
You could always do what some others are doing... implement the SpamVampire into your site... when people are visiting your site, they're also draining data from the spammers who are polluting your site. Spammers soon learn that spamming any sites associated with your domain is a negative income endeavor, and they learn to leave your sites alone. Check out THESCAMBAITER.COM for an example (as well as a lot of hilarious stories of 419-baiting).
Cool done. Our sites belong to us, and we won't be overrun by any jerks.
Excerpt: FarmOut Central Intouch has been writing spam comments on blogs. Yuga has been vigilant enough to notice this early on, even as other bloggers like myself almost just passed the comments off as written...
Your words nearly brought a tear to my eye. I write www.recessmonkey.com and the daily mission of deleting and blacklisting blogspam is soul destroying. But if i didn't do it the bastards would suck the life out of my small Recess Monkey community. I hatethemhatethemhatethem Thanks Recess Monkey
The worst is when you have a forum, blog, wiki, and guestbook all on the same site. Might as well shoot yourself. That being said, there is a new player out for stopping link spam (whether it be comment, wiki, forum, guestbook, etc) called LinkSleeve. It is free, and works via XML-RPC, so it platform independent. Simply put, it collects your visitor's post and all of the included urls. If that url has occurred more than the threshold limit for # posted urls per hour, a "reject" response is returned. Otherwise, an "accept" response is returned. It is already working pretty well on the handful of sites it is on right now, but it gets better and better the more sites that use it. Anyway, good luck in the war on Spam!
This discussion has been closed.
Trackback from andlife's Plog
November 8, 2003 9:25 PM
Comment Spam Manifesto
Excerpt: Adam Kalsey has had enough of the comment spam seen on his and other web logs. I myself can volunteer to help do a bit of legwork tracking spammers down. What can you do to help rid fellow blogs of spam?