spam

Twitter Spam

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Today I got 15 follow requests on Twitter from political campaigns, all seem to be unofficial. I’ve blocked all of them. If this continues, I may protect updates to prevent those unsolicited requests. I do NOT support ANY of those candidates who requested to follow me and I dislike most of them. The only candidate I follow on Twitter is Barack Obama and I want to keep it that way.

Content Scrapers

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I just checked my Akismet moderation queue and found that no less than 5 splogs republished an item I posted less than two hours ago. I bet this item will also be scraped and republished. If you’re reading this anyplace other than mcdevzone.com, this post was illegally republished.

Fighting comment spam

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I’ve implemented Donncha O Caoimh‘s steps to fight comment spam here. Two of the plugins, Comment Referrers and Delink Comment Author add links to the comment moderation email I receive that show the referrer, which helps identify spammers, and remove links from the comment.

Lucia’s Linky Love makes this blog less attractive to spammers by adding ‘nofollow’ to their links, while rewarding regular commenters by making their comments ‘dofollow’.

Content stealing splog

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I received a pingback in my Akismet moderation queue a little while ago that led me to a splog that’s stealing content from this and many other blogs. It simply reposts blog entries verbatim and inserts google ads in each post. It grabbed my previous post just a few minutes after I posted it. I won’t post a link to it here to give them any more traffic, but I did report it to Fight Splog.

I also notice an increase in comment spam over the last few days, with about one or two a day being held for moderation instead of being immediately marked as spam.