It’s my blog, and I get to determine what is spam and what is not. The latest round of human-generated spam is getting past the automated spamblocks because the comments look valid. They’re natural language, often on topic, and occasionally even interesting or insightful – or relevant to the post being spammed.
I’m using a few WordPress plugins to help ease the pain, but for the love of Xenu, this bullshit should not be necessary.
But, if I think a comment is spam, I reserve the right to nuke it. Or to remove the URL and leave the comment in place. It’s my blog, and I’m sick and tired of people crapping on it in order to game google. PFO.
That’s interesting that you call this a “new” policy, seems like the only one to have in my mind (though of course one wants to be judicious in deleting/editing other people’s comments, it’s a fine line). I am intrigued about these new spam that are getting by the filters – are you able to point (or maybe offline, send one along) to an example. I expect if you are getting hit then maybe the rest of us are and don’t know it, or soon will, so it would be good to learn from your examples. Cheers, Scott
I guess the part that’s “new” is my more liberal definition of spam. If it’s a valid comment, but with a spammy URL attached to the person posting it, it’s still spam. Before, I’d leave all valid comments. Now, I plan to be ruthless in eradicating anything that smells of spiced ham.
That makes sense, I have been seeing those too in the last month and they do present a real challenge because, as you say, the comment can often be (somewhat) substantive while the URL clearly spammy. My reaction has been the same as yours, but it does present an interesting editorial quandry.
You did see this amazingly good article by Donncha today, right?
http://ocaoimh.ie/2008/02/27/how-to-successfully-spam-blogs-and-how-to-fight-back/
Good stuff for fighting back against this stuff.
Chris
@scott: it’s the editorial side that had me squeemish. it’s generally not too cool to just edit comments – that’s changing what someone else wrote – but if they’re a spam roach, I think all bets are off…
@chris: I did see that, and commented with a link to my latest rant on Google’s ineptness in dealing with the problem they created with the PageRank algorithm…
Chris, I hadn’t seen that, so “Thanks!” That is helpful. Ahhh, distributed online learning in action 😉
hi norman,
beside akismet are you using other plugins? if you do, care to share and recommend their strong points?