Big spike in blog comment spam?
Tim Finin, 1:00pm 15 July 2006For 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
Ebiquity Blog
July 2nd, 2008 at 11:54 am
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.