Damn spam again!

[xoggoth]

Put all the usual checks in the feedback for my small business website, nofollow, ban exploits, known spam bots, known spam words etc and still getting it. No definite patterns in the ISP or machines generally although I do notice the latest bunch is with same hosts as me.

Beats me what the point is, this is a dynamic page on a minor website, there are no products and no links in the spam, just guff like "Thanks for the valuable information. I have used it".

Anyone know what they are doing it for or how better to counter it? Cheers.

PS It's not one of you lot havin' a larf is it?

 

[Sysman]

Beats me what the point is, this is a dynamic page on a minor website, there are no products and no links in the spam, just guff like "Thanks for the valuable information. I have used it".

I think that sometimes they are just testing to see what gets through and the real stuff comes later. Last year I was getting loads of stuff which at first glance did nothing at all, but my logs showed they were spamming links for cheap cigarettes, pills and potions in the "referer" (sic) field.

This would hit anyone who publishes their web statistics online. I found a German search engine doing this to promote themselves - hundreds of page views every day. They tried to disguise it by masquerading as different browsers, but that didn't fool me for long. Would probably go unnoticed on busy sites though and I assume that is their aim. And yes, I found some sites out there giving them free links via their stats.

if you get visited by big finder dot de, block 'em 'cos they are just wasting your bandwidth

 

[Sockpuppet]

Are you using reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books

 

[d000hg]

Those captcha things are really starting to get on my nerves. I am now getting ones I can't read fairly often and have to refresh. Current widely-used captchas seem to be a dead-end because the software is obviously getting better, and they can't make it much harder to read before nobody can read it.

 

[eek]

Those captcha things are really starting to get on my nerves. I am now getting ones I can't read fairly often and have to refresh. Current widely-used captchas seem to be a dead-end because the software is obviously getting better, and they can't make it much harder to read before nobody can read it.

Given that captcha's can be farmed out at $1.39 per 1000 decoded CAPTCHAs I do hope they die a death. However I'm sure the arms race will operate in the typical big business way of making them even harder rather than easier.

As for the original comment sadly spam is a fact of live. Unless you manually check every entry you are going to have spam and most of it will be either on the off chance that it works or to test to see how your website works before he invites his 100,000 friends to add their comments.

 

[TheFaQQer]

I rely on Akismet to filter most of my spam out. Occasionally fails to spot one, and very rarely will find ham instead.

 

[xoggoth]

Cheers all.

Did think of Captcha but agree it is a pain. Looked at Akismet but value of the feeback link is probably not worth even £60 a year.

I set up a page for quick deletion. Also renamed and moved the code, seems to have foiled the buggers for now. Not sure a directory called comment was a good idea.

 

[Sysman]

I rely on Akismet to filter most of my spam out. Occasionally fails to spot one, and very rarely will find ham instead.

I've been using Akismet for about 3 years on a Wordpress site. It's let precisely one spam through in that time.

It's free if you are using the Akismet Wordpress plugin.

 

[xoggoth]

According to the site t's only free for personal use.

 

[Sysman]

Sorry, didn't remember about the personal use bit.