Blog FeedThe Battle Continues
As the War on Spam continues across cyberspace, I recently discovered a method that spammers use to pimp their sites and software. It’s far from the first - e-mail spam is a classic, and we get that. Spammers also generate comment spam throughout thousands upon thousands of sites in the blogosphere. Some even go so far as to sign up to forums with limp accounts, purely so they can link to their own site in their forum profile - to catch curious people who view their profile - to increase their Google pagerank.
These methods have all been experienced here on Aelon. Needless to say Aelon’s mail filter is superb. The precautions taken on blog comments have also meant that since they were introduced, virtually no spam has gotten through. Any advert forum accounts are promptly deleted. The latest method Aelon has experienced though, is referrer spam. Essentially, software companies create software that can create fake referrers in the site’s web statistics. They then use this software themselves to demonstrate how well it works, so they can sell it to other low lives. A lot of blogs post their referrers publicly, and rely on them quite a lot, so this method is no better than any other which spammers use.
So it also brings the count to four of the ways we’ve combatted the spam. A quick Google search of my own revealed a simple trick to send the bastards’ web crawlers back to their own sites instead of wasting Aelons resources. If every single blog or mass blog website used this good idea, spam would indeed be dealt a hefty blow. Nevertheless, for our own site - another victory. And Aelon stands as a strong fortress as the war rages across the internet.
27th November | Reply
The only way to succesfully eradicate spam will be to go to spammers, and STAB THEM IN THEIR FACE.
ofcourse, sadly enough, this will never happen
27th November | Reply
Ha! Apparently you’ve never heard of the internet gun!
Hooray for Aelon being back up. As I launched my web browser 5 seconds ago I was praying to see that lovely logo once more.
28th November | Reply
Okay, serious comment, then… I went to that page you linked to, and it made sense what they were trying to do, but near the end they said “The people who would spam someone else’s web site to promote their own are scum,” I mean come on! Scum? I don’t know why you people get so angry about this sort of thing, crying out for the death penalty or grimacing at the prospect of being able to stab the perpetraters.
Granted, I don’t run a website, so I can’t appreciate the annoyance to its fullest… but it’s just relatively clever people using obvious loopholes to their advantage. If the solution is so easy, people should implement it! You can’t expect advertisers to ignore opportunity.
Same goes with people that bitch about SPAM in their e-mail. They blame third-party sites and sneaky sneakers for their influx of SPAM, but the only time it plagued me was with my first e-mail account, when I signed up to the Hotmail directory, and every e-newsletter under the sun. With my next, I ditched the newsletters and directory listing, and surprise surprise, I could surf freely and join trusted sites without any adverts reaching me.
28th November | Reply
Well, yeah, my spam experience is really mostly since I started Aelon. As far as e-mail goes, my @aelon.net addresses received (and still receive) a lot of spam, which thankfully I have a good filter for. I removed all the mailto: links, and it’s helped, but there are still bots out there that are good at guessing them. ‘aelon[at]aelon.net’ is the default mail address that comes with the domain, and I’ve never had it listed on any webpage ever, but e-mail bots even go so far as to guess at domain name e-mails to spam them.
The most annoying is actually comment spam, as it directly gets in the way of conversations on blogs. Some poor blogs I’ve seen have had an entry with one or two proper comments, following by a wave of 2 dozen spam posts. It’s outrageous, and very time consuming to clean up.
In all cases, be it comment spam, e-mail spam, and referrer spam, it’s a waste of my resources in time, bandwidth and space. Bandwidth and space aren’t free, and time is better spent on something else - like watching more Seinfeld episodes.
Spammers have no right to sap the resources of so many people without their permission. But they do, and that’s why they’re scum.