Comment spam, argh!

[Stacey]

Anyone else having trouble with comment spam in their blogs?

Right now my blog is being *flooded* with comment spam for some online gambling site. I added some keywords and the email address the current spammer is using to my spam trigger list, so they're not showing up directly on the site anymore. Still, now there are about 20 comments being held in the moderation queue. I'm waiting for it to subside before I delete them all at once.

If it keeps happening, I'm probably going to have to turn off the option that emails me whenever I have a new comment because this is driving me up a wall.

Anyone else seeing this kind of thing?

[RachelG]

I don't have a blog, so I don't get spam due to blog comments, but I do have people like that trying to sign my guestbook. (All messages are pre-approved by me before they get entered, and those particular ones do not get entered.)

Rachel
www.crochetpatterncentral.com (http://www.crochetpatterncentral.com)

[threeolivemartini]

i havent encountered this as of yet..

i dont know what you should do to stop it..maybe turn in the spammers to the place you have your blog maybe they can stop it..

[rebeccav]

oh my gracious :( - i haven't had that yet... ick, sure hope i don't.

[Julie]

i've been lucky so far. Hopefully, eventually they'll get tired and move on. I hope!! :fc

[Donna]

I've seen it a lot on blogs powered by Moveable Type and things like that. I haven't had any (I use Haloscan) and I haven't seen any on other blogs with Haloscan. They have filters and blocks in place to help deal with it. They don't eliminate the problem entirely, but seem to be quite good.

[Stacey]

That was freaky! I think I got about 50 of them all in all, though only the first 5 or 10 actually appeared on the blog before I updated the spam keyword list. Then I mass-deleted them from the moderation queue

Since I was getting all :th I wasn't thinking straight, but this morning I thought I'd look into how to prevent it. The problem was that it seemed to be automated - every comment had a different IP address, so it wasn't one person doing it over and over again. So I finally had the sense to go to the Wordpress support forum, and just in case anyone else here uses wordpress, here's what I found: Comment spam in Wordpress (http://wordpress.org/support/3/13443)

That was really helpful - apparently there are people who use automated tools to spam blogs, and renaming the comments file with the instructions in that post should solve the problem :fc

It's funny, I've had a separate journal online for over a year that uses Movable Type, and I've never had this problem there. Just bad luck, I guess!