T w e n t y S i d e d
I get a lot of spam on this blog. This place is quasi-popular and pretty dang old by internet standards. This means it’s both an attractive target for spammers and there’s been plenty of time for this site to get added to everyone’s rolodex.
There are several layers of protection between the idiots and your eyeballs. First are the crude tools: IP blocking for particularly naughty IP rangesA year ago I tried removing some of these, and within a few days got crushed by unwanted traffic. I don’t know if it was a flood of spam, a low-yield DOS attack, or WHAT. But I needed my hosting provider to help me out and re-block the troublemakers. I’m less interested in lifting IP bans now. Sorry if you’re stuck in one of those nasty IP ranges and you can’t even reach the site to read this apology.. Then there’s filtering for clearly red-flag behaviors, like someone trying to leave comments who never loaded the page they’re supposedly commenting on, or people leaving a comment every few seconds. After that is the keyword checking, and filtering out people who post tons of links.
The final layer of spam filtering is… me.
Some filters delete the comment instantly. Some filters put the spam into the spam folder, where I’ll never see it unless I go looking for it. Some filters put suspect messages into moderation, where I’ll see them and have to choose to approve or delete them.
Spam is kind of like the weather. It varies in intensity. Some days I’ll only see a few, and some days I’ll see dozens. But over the last couple of years the spam has settled into a very predictable pattern. I never see porn links these days. Piracy stuff is now super-rare. Brute-force word salad messages are either an abandoned technique, or the filters have gotten really good at catching them, because I never see those anymore. The messages that are just dozens on links don’t get through. The only thing I see these days are the plausible-but-fake comment spam, which are just a little too subtle for the spam filters to detect. These are messages of semi-coherent English with no links. Usually the given name is the thing they’re selling, so that (if I allowed the spam through) clicking on the name would take you to their site.
The messages usually look something like this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Spam Script”
