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Big spike in blog comment spam?

Big spike in blog comment spam?

Tim Finin, 1:00pm 15 July 2006

For some reason the number of spam blog comments making it through our Akismet plugin has gone way up in the past two weeks. According to Akismet’s stats page, it’s not due to an overall increase in comment spam and our blog has not suddenly gotten more popular.

For the past year, we’ve been getting only two to four spam comments a week that weren’t immediately identified as spam by Akismet and required moderation. During the last two weeks we’ve gotten more than ten a day! I’ve not been paying attention to any changes to the rate of spam comments trapped by Akismet. Since I’ve never seen a false positive, I’ve gotten into the habit of ignoring them. It looks like we’re getting ~300 a day. I think that’s much higher than we were experiencing, maybe by a factor of four.

I do notice that we’re getting copies of the same comment submitted to a large number posts going deep into our archives. While I’ve not been paying close attention, I think in the past it was typical for spam comments to be submitted to relatively new posts. Maybe there is new comment spam software out there that uses Google blog search to access RSS feeds of the 100 most recent posts for a given blog.

But why isn’t this showing up in Akismet’s statistics?

If you can shed some light on this, please do

2 Responses to “Big spike in blog comment spam?”

  1. DSH Says:

    A site for which I volunteer was recently swamped with rapid spam, possibly because someone specifically tuned a spambot to hit the site at its vulnerabilites. Adding in recaptcha (http://recaptcha.net/) helped the site and helps nonprofit book scanning as well.

  2. anjey_friendky Says:

    The story shows how to unprotect drm from protected wmv, wma, m4p, m4v, m4a, aac files and convert to unprotected WMV, MP4, MP3, WMA or any video and audio formats you like, such as AVI, MPEG, MOV, 3GP, m4a, aac, wmv, ogg, wav…
    It’s easy and a must do operation, folks!

    Point 1: I’ve purchased and downloaded some wmv videos, which is drm protected – so I cant copy them to MP3 player and my wifes htc diamond OR ANY DEVICES? I was shocked!!! #%#$%!!
    WHY this happens?
    So found a way – drmbuster (drmbuster.com, drmbuster.com) – it converts my wmv (and avi actually) directly to my iPod.
    found another software:drmremoval – seems to works slowly, but perhaps I miss smth.

    Point 2:
    Can’t copy to my iphone avi from my hard disk! I own that avi (movie maker production :) ) and I own the iPhone! So what&!. I can’t – I get a message: “cannot be imported because it does not appear to be a valid exported file”… ###ing limitation.
    I was amazed, but drmbuster did this job for me too. It even recompressed video to iphone screen size – so I don’t have to copy all 900mbytes to devices. Just 200!!

    The program is capable to convert any format I had on my hard drive – I even dragged there my while entertainment hard drive (I use different ones for windows and entertainment, to not loose valuable video), and it reconverted everithing, that looks like a video or sound.
    fortunately, I hadn’t iphone conneted, otherwise it may be fully fill its memory!
    Really, extremely easy to use piece of software – napster converter, itunes converter.

    I am a big fun of skins and skinned software! I contacted their support, and was given an answer – If you gather some more users who desires this – we will implement for you!
    What do you think juys, let’s ask them?
    Please….

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