In the past couple of weeks there has been an enormous increase in the amount of spam/advertising/bogus comments showing up on this site.   It might be because this site has gotten onto some list of sites for spamming or it might be just a general increase in spam across the net or it could be because there has been quite a bit of traffic recently.

Whatever the case, these comments and link-backs really get in the way of having a meaningful discussion and are a huge annoyance.   It’s important to catch them as much as possible, because many spammers are able to detect if the comment has been successfully posted and, if it was, they will continue to post to the site.  If it’s not, the spambot may know enough not to bother with the site anymore.

For this reason I’ve had to increase the level of filtering.   This includes filtering messages from certain IP ranges, domains and email addresses, as well as messages which contain certain key words and phrases.   Some of the filtering methods also include filtering messages which fit a profile derived from public spambot lists.   Sites that receive spam report it to various databases and the patterns are used to reconize when the spambot comes to another site.

Unfortunately, as the filtration standards are made tighter, more legitimate messages are likely to get moderated as suspicious.   They are not deleted!  They end up in a spam folder which I regularly review and approve messages that are not spam and don’t belong in there.   However, this might take a day or so, because I do have a life aside from this site.

So if your comment does not show up, that is probably why.   Please don’t keep trying to post the same message 20 times in a row and then start posting messages about how you’re being censored.   That’s not what’s happening.   It’s just an issue of the spam filters not being perfect.

---

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Announcements, Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

---

View blog reactions