The War Against Spam

I’ve been waging a relentless war against spam for year on multiple fronts. And I’m losing.
My brilliant catch-all strategy/use hundreds of email addresses so I can identify the bastards that give up my email and then do who knows what backfired on me. I had to switch gears and it’s been a lot of work. You don’t want to know the details.

My previous email addresses became unusable long ago. I recently had to ask the owner of the kirsch.net domain to kill it. Sad. Don’t send me email there, it hasn’t been in use for years anyway. All spam.
I use spam filters. I train them. On both Mail.app and on Thunderbird.
And still, the Viagra advertisements will not stop!

Ok, I’m not alone here, and sadly many have learned to live with it. But this is not the point of this post (just some venting). I want to talk about a different kind of spam. Not the kind you get in your email mailbox, but the kind us bloggers and webmasters need to deal with in our websites.

Yes, The MKX® has comment spam problems. I’ve tried things before and they helped a lot but did not eliminate the problem. I still get many spam comments that I just delete. Sure, they never make it to the website but I’d say that roughly 80% of the comments made on this blog are spam. A real pain in the ass for me.

Now, I use the excellent WordPress for this website, and so do millions of others (even my mom uses it!) so I can imagine thousands of russian hackers putting together perl scripts to spam the hell out of every WordPress blog out there. Fair enough, more bang for the buck.

But how, oh how in the world did it ever get to this?

Next on this series… La Polla Defaced, Jinuj.net, and a worthy CAPTCHA.
to be continued…

6 thoughts on “The War Against Spam”

  1. Weird, I don’t get any spam comments on my blog. Maybe blogger found the ultimate solution for this… as for e-mail, it’s impossible.

  2. Blogger uses a CAPTCHA to avoid comment spam. It makes it very hard and expensive (computationally speaking) for spammers to spam those. I will write more on that later.

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