November 10, 2010
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My Xanga is Full of Spam
Approximately once a week I get a spam message on my Xanga comments. Usually it’s a registered user. Usually it’s a comment on a really old blog post that nobody reads anymore. Occasionally it’s on a recent post, such as the one I just got today on by blog post about who will follow Obama as President.
The spam is fundamentally the same. It’s usually some nonsense pretend serious comment followed by a link to somewhere that I don’t dare click on. The key of course is the link. It’s trying to get stupid people to click. The text is irrelevant.
Why is my Xanga so attractive to spam? I regularly block known spam accounts and delete spam messages but they still appear. What can I do to reduce this spam amount? Do I have to just suffer through it or disable comments?
What can XANGA do to reduce the frequency of spam? Well as always I have some ideas.
How about a way to lock older posts from getting comments while keeping your newer posts comment worthy? How about the ability to limit users ability to post links in comments? Or a way to limit the length of comments? Those things would radically reduce the value of spam comments? How about a dedicated learning spam filter you can apply to your account akin to what we have in emails? How about a system where we can approve of comments before they appear on our blogs?
Do you have spam problems? What do you think is the best way to handle it personally and for Xanga as a whole?
Comments (5)
I dont get spam on xanga, but when I get it its usualy some african beauty looking for husband.
Guh, spam. I don’t get enough of it to really upset me, but sometimes I consider it an insult to my intelligence. Like when an account leaves a spam comment, then tries to friend and subscribe. Like I just won’t REALIZE it’s spam if the account friends and subscribes.
And I also weary of the African beauties looking for husbands, since they can’t be bothered to check my gender.
Probably the best way to cut down on spam comments would be allowing comment moderation. Some people would use that just to keep out anyone who disagreed with them, but if that’s the kind of blog they want to run it’s not my problem, I suppose. The spam would meet a wall and that would be a good thing.
Do you have a problem, though, with spam footprints?
Since we had to take the new-new private page (I consider the old-old private page unuseable, so it’s the latest model or nothing), I see footprints in that “recent visitors” module to the left. I’ve wanted to avoid looking at my footprints, but there they are. So sometimes I check to see how someone found my site. Once I clicked on a referral address because it looked a bit odd- and it took me to some site selling Viagra.
And I was like, wait. A spammer did that on purpose. It was a very sneaky way to get me to click on a link. Holy cats. This is a new method. Not good.
Last night I was checking my footprints (stupid recent-visitors module) and saw that I’d gotten a hit from Poland. The referral address was a bit.ly.
Talk about making me curious. Even if I had ever linked to my main page using a shortened URL, I always use Tiny URL. So that referral couldn’t have come from me. Did someone else link to my site? Probably not, S&S keeps a pretty low profile. It was probably just another spam link- and if it wanted to hide behind a bit.ly, who knows what it was. But I can’t be sure- and for some reason that bugs me. Which a spammer would depend on. But it doesn’t bug me enough to click on a mysterious link, so no worries there.
It’s not that big a deal, I guess, but it indicates that the spammers are looking for very specific ways to put their links in front of us.
I get one a year, but still want to address each of your ideas above:
1) I initially thought of ‘privatizing’ older posts, but then they become invisible to the public, so no-go. It would need to be through a code change in the xanga-programming
2) disallowing link-posting would be throwing out a valuable baby to drain the bath-water. Links are a vital function.
3) limiting comment-length also negatively impacts functionality; sometimes one actually does need to quote most of Finnigan’s Wake to make his point, ha
4) a ‘learning’ filter is attractive but expensive… and flawed from time to time. I’d be scared to call one of your posts “viagra for my tired mental phallus”
And 5) Comment-moderation takes the spontaneity and instant-gratification out of da commmenting-biz. I hate being witty on Blog-spot; you check a week later to see if anyone got the joke.
So file me under “Bad News”, I guess.
Spammers are like the vilian in the hebrew axiom: ‘The rock that one fool threw into the well, ten wise men can’t get back out.’
Spot-delete and Block, for now. Oh, and when caught, they’d make great ornaments hung upside-down from telephone poles.
@SoapAndShampoo - You know I never really pay close attention to the referers so I’ve never gotten into the spam footprints thing. Generally I feel footprints should be eliminated. I’ve never liked them. It tends to create a kind of culture of spying and paranoia that I don’t like.
But it is amazing how clever the spammers can get. I wouldn’t have imagined they’d try using referrer links in footprints.
I really hate url shorteners. They are super dangerous for spam because they totally hide the site being referred to. you don’t know where you’re going. If only twitter hadn’t forced them upon us. But I usually use dft.ba for my shortener because it stands for ‘don’t forget to be awesome’ a message i believe in.
@jsolberg - my idea wasn’t to privatize older entries but simply lock them from further comments while keeping them visible to the world. But still requires a code change so you’re right.
I agree with everything you’ve said except that links are a vital function for comments. They are vital for blogs but comments don’t necessarily need them. A lot of comment systems including youtube’s aggressively block putting links in comments.
But yeah any solution has trade offs same as with trying to filter spam from email but I still think we can do a much better job than we have been.
Mostly I think that when I find a spammer there should be a trivial way to mark them as a spammer so that they can be quickly banned by Xanga altogether so nobody else has to get their spam.
I deleted like 6 spam comments today… sounded like legit comments, but then they’re not… really hate it…