Meet The Top 10 Comment Spammers

August 26th, 2007 I have opened this blog for testing. Now any spammer can get to my moderation queue.

February 6th, 2004 After some deliberation, and seeing others, I decided to leave the commenting section on my blog un-moderated. Today I was mildly surprised to find almost all my posts had a comment to it.

March 22nd, 2004 As you all know blogs are a good place to dump the links to your casino/gambling site or other scams. Unfortunately I actively resist any attempt to spam this blog.

August 12th, 2007 I am seeing a steady and alarming rise of russian comment spams. Often people will not understand a comment in a foreign language and may approve it in a hurry.

March 12th, 2005 A 'comprehensive' sweep of the net by 70 law enforcement organisations from 26 countries should help authorities combat phishers, spammers and scammers, says a leading consumer protection agency. It sounds too good to be true and effective.

December 3rd, 2004 Lycos Europe as you probably know has created a screen-saver which allows a controlling lycos software to target the idle time of the machines which installed the screen-savers to flood the network of known spammers. Some people are getting concerned that it amounts to ddos attack.

May 29th, 2006 I briefly reviewed my corpus of 4569 comment spams in my Akismet queue. Of them over 53% of the spam has been contributed by Top 100 spamming IP addresses.

November 28th, 2005 Imagine a pickpocket leaving a note in the pocket they have picked informing the victim that they are very sorry about picking their pocket and what he can do to rectify the situation. Neil found ethical spammers in his wiki (read about wiki spamming) who left a note after they spammed: < !– We leave content intact.

January 24th, 2005 A discussion on rel="nofollow" technique versus CAPTCHA

July 24th, 2006 Many online blogging software and other products require some type of cron and / or asynchronous execution functionality. Spammers and web robots are an essential part of any website today.

August 5th, 2009 While discussing the top 10 tips to improve your twittering, I had indicated that don't make yourself look like a spammer. In real world, with shooting popularity Twitter has also invited the spammers to have a party.

February 1st, 2005 Yesterday I found some (around 20) irrelevant medical ads in my spam-trap :) Today I got a comment: "This site has --expletive deleted-- nasty hidden script (which prevents me from spamming)" - wrote some exasperated kiddie-comment-spammer in his comments. You bet! It appears that the spammers have resorted to trackback spamming to get around captcha.

December 24th, 2004 My recipe for getting rid of comment spam once and for all: Install WordPress 1.2.1 or later. Install ImageAuth hack Go to Options Tab.

February 22nd, 2007 Comment Guard 0.3 Beta is a bug fix release. Very occassionally the plugin would request a valid commenter to submit his comment again.

February 5th, 2008 The Spamhaus Exploits Block List (XBL) is a realtime database of IP addresses of hijacked PCs infected by illegal 3rd party exploits, including open proxies (HTTP, socks, AnalogX, wingate, etc), worms/viruses with built-in spam engines, and other types of trojan-horse exploits. I was recently testing this list againt spam email.