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Comment Spam and Its Consequences

In the past 24 hours this blog has received more than 1,600 comment spams — fake comments with links to the usual sleazy Web operations that pollute the online world. The  spam-control system I use, Akismet, has trapped almost all of the spams, so you won’t be burdened with them.

Unfortunately, it’s also possible that you posted a genuine comment that got inappropriately identified as spam. If so, it may have been deleted in a bulk-delete operation that I do once a day or so. I don’t have the time to go through the comments identified as spam one at a time to un-mark them, because of the horrible volume of this crap.

If you’ve tried to post a legitimate comment that didn’t make it through, let me know. If I haven’t run the bulk-delete before you tell me, I’ll be able to retrieve your posting and make it public. If not, I apologize.

But the spammers — such slime they are — have left me little choice.

3 Comments on “Comment Spam and Its Consequences”

  1. #1 calú
    on Mar 28th, 2007 at 6:50 am

    Try Did you pass math plugin. It works fine.

  2. #2 jjb
    on Mar 28th, 2007 at 10:23 am

    Dan-

    You might want to have your web folks look at the logic in this wordpress plugin:

    http://boakes.org/akismet-worst-offenders/

    It looks through the akismet spam and determines which comments are _definitely_ spam (for example, if there are 300 messages from the very same ip address).

  3. #3 Dan Gillmor
    on Mar 29th, 2007 at 1:53 am

    Thanks — we’ll give both a look.