This post is a slight departure from my normal advice about how to use LinkedIn – to talk about blogging about LinkedIn.
I was looking around the blog site’s dashboard the other day and noticed that the anti-spam solutions on the site have been blocking an incredible number of comments.
Since I get a relatively modest amount of “real” comments, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t losing some good comments, so I looked further…
Anti-spam technologies for blogs
The LinkedIn Personal Trainer blog is supported on WordPress, and I use two plugins to manage comments – and keep my life sane.
The first is Akismet, the second is WP-SpamFree. These two seem to do a good job.
I keep comments anonymous but approve them. That is, anyone can post and while I ask for a name and email, a commenter could make those up and is not required to create a login (like you need another one of those;-)
I want to make it easy for individuals to comment…
4,456 spam comments in the last 4 months
Yes, you’ve read that right – more than a thousand spam comments each of the last 4 months, and July isn’t even over…
Here’s the spam counts these tools have rejected over the past 12 months:
| 2009-07 | 1023 |
| 2009-06 | 876 |
| 2009-05 | 1511 |
| 2009-04 | 1046 |
| 2009-03 | 566 |
| 2009-02 | 152 |
| 2009-01 | 291 |
| 2008-12 | 245 |
| 2008-11 | 277 |
| 2008-10 | 331 |
| 2008-09 | 182 |
| 2008-08 | 128 |
| 2008-07 | 44 |
You see – when a web site does well, it attracts a crowd…
Saved myself 100 hours this month!
If I had to process these spam and it just took 6 seconds each to click on, evaluate, and remove, I’d have spent many, many, many hours each of these past few months dealing with it.
Mostly sex and drugs…
So yes, almost all of the spam is looking to advertise a sex or drug site (or sex-drug site). I wanted to check to see what was being thrown away and entry after entry was a blatant sex/drug link, thinly veiled sex/drug link, or hidden sex/drug link with a comment of “great site, I thought you might like to check out xyz…’
I might miss your comment.
And yes, I did find a comment that looked like it was legitimate but had been flagged as spam.
But in all, I’m better off auto-filtering them.
So – if you’ve tried to comment and it didn’t get up, feel free to contact me outside of the blog and let me know – maybe it will get me going on a new post;-)
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock