Anyone who manages their own blog can relate to my frustration with spam in the blogosphere. This is the first topic I’d like to share my thoughts on as a part of my small series on Social Media Frustrations.
Are trackbacks useful anymore?
Trackbacks served a great purpose for blog authors to be alerted (and let their visitors) know when another person links to your blog entry in their blog entry. However, for the past year, I’ve seen excessively high volume of trackback spam compared to a year ago. I’m debating whether or not I should continue to allow trackbacks; however, this begs the question, are trackbacks even useful anymore?
Comment Spam is more annoying than effective.
While a blog is a great communication tool, there’s folks that we don’t want to talk to — spammers. Spammers aim to promote their products either to your visitors, or to Google in an effort to raise their PageRank. I’m perplexed by the volume of comment spam because it just isn’t effective because of anti-spam services like Akismet, Defensio or Spam Karma. It’s more frustrating because as a blog owner, I have to go through, tag comments that slipped through as spam and force legitimate comments through.
My question is, does comment spam fall under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003? If legislation could be enacted to cover this category of abuse, then perhaps we could seek resolution and reduction of Spam. On the contrary, we can judge the effectiveness of the current legislation based on all the junk mail we still receive.
Spam + Blogs = Splogs = Junk!
As more chatter happens in the blogosphere, less than noble “marketers” focus their efforts to infiltrate it and compete for your attention. Their blogs lack useful (or interesting) content, except for excerpts of otherwise legitimate blog posts. The goal of these blogs are intended to mislead readers and force inexperienced readers into clicking on their contextual text advertising. In all honestly, Splogs are effective, but they are only as good as their advertising, so if you report them to the advertising network, they risk forfeiture of all earnings. While I don’t have the time to report these, it would be nice if services like Technorati would provide an abuse reporting services.
The solution to all this is to provide stronger tools for publishers to protect their content from spam, allow easier reporting to providers. SpamCop accomplished this for e-mail, but it would be even better of a service could expand carry the same benefits for bloggers.
Fed up with blog spam? Share your tips and tricks or even gripes in the comments below.
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I hear you, Joe. Just this week, I turned off trackbacks on my blog because it was pretty much always spam.
I find trackbacks very interesting still. It allows me and my readers to know who links back to a given article. It’s true that the trackback implementation as it is right now is broken and very prone to spam, but a good spam filter can do the trick quite well.
Carl,
I agree, the trackback feature is pretty cool, but is inherently vulnerable to a lot of abuse from spammers. I have a question, compared to Akismet, is Defensio more effective, and is it easy to setup for Wordpress?
S.P. Gass,
Sorry to hear that you disabled trackbacks. To me, at that point, the spammers have won. I’d love to think of a more permanent solution to address the problem at hand. Any ideas?
Thanks both of you for commenting.
~Joe
Joe: Of course, I’m totally biased so you might want to do your own research, but our users tell us that accuracy is superior to Akismet’s. They also love our nifty way of displaying the quarantine.
Installation is just as easy as installing any Wordpress plugin. You only need to get a free API key from our website. Give it a shot!
I’m still new to blogging and the other commenter got me thinking about filters. I might try activating the askimet plugin in WordPress and turning trackbacks back on.
This stuff is brutal on the Wordpress side as it's also delegitamizing great wordpress blogs because most people know that these ready made Adsense templates are fooling too many as you say “inexperienced surfers” so they avoid all wordpress blogs thinking their all “splogs”.. I know as I have one on WP and one on Blogger and WP blows blogger away in every category except this is non existent for most blogger blogs now that Haloscan is dead.
I use a standard message, take a screenshot of the page with their comments (the Admistration page) and email to every single one this message:
_____________________________
I'm advising you that from this point on every single email spam comment I receive from you I will file suit in local Chicago Circuit court for violation of the Spammcann act at each violation punishable to $1000 US dollars per incident,
“In the first case brought by a spam recipient to actually go to trial in California, the Superior Court of California held that people who receive false and deceptive spam emails are entitled to liquidated damages of $1,000 per email under California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. In the California Superior Court ruling (PDF), Judge Marie S. Weiner made many references to the fact that Defendants used anonymous domain name registration and used unregistered business names in her ruling. This is different from the Gordon case, where one only had to perform a simple whois lookup to identify the sender; here, Defendants used 'from' lines of 'Paid Survey' and 'Your Promotion' with anonymously registered domain names. Judge Weiner's decision makes it clear that the California law is not preempted by the I CAN-SPAM Act. This has been determined in a few prior cases, including my own. (See http://www.barbieslapp.com/spam for some of those cases.)”
003.bmp
Furthermore, if you don't take me serious just keep doing it because as of now you'll owe me at least 2 grand for these 2 messages along with the other 65 I got in just one day on my blog and I'm keeping track and warning every single one of you and I'm hoping you continue so I can sue. I can use the money.
Just stop , we're not *(&^%&^ stupid out here. Smarter than you, believe me.
Chicago Ray
Chicago IL 60090
____________________________________________________
Time consuming yes, a little deceptive, perhaps but not as much as they, effective, almost 100% after the 1st email….just a thought…
This stuff is brutal on the Wordpress side as it's also delegitamizing great wordpress blogs because most people know that these ready made Adsense templates are fooling too many as you say “inexperienced surfers” so they avoid all wordpress blogs thinking their all “splogs”.. I know as I have one on WP and one on Blogger and WP blows blogger away in every category except this is non existent for most blogger blogs now that Haloscan is dead.
I use a standard message, take a screenshot of the page with their comments (the Admistration page) and email to every single one this message:
_____________________________
I'm advising you that from this point on every single email spam comment I receive from you I will file suit in local Chicago Circuit court for violation of the Spammcann act at each violation punishable to $1000 US dollars per incident,
“In the first case brought by a spam recipient to actually go to trial in California, the Superior Court of California held that people who receive false and deceptive spam emails are entitled to liquidated damages of $1,000 per email under California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. In the California Superior Court ruling (PDF), Judge Marie S. Weiner made many references to the fact that Defendants used anonymous domain name registration and used unregistered business names in her ruling. This is different from the Gordon case, where one only had to perform a simple whois lookup to identify the sender; here, Defendants used 'from' lines of 'Paid Survey' and 'Your Promotion' with anonymously registered domain names. Judge Weiner's decision makes it clear that the California law is not preempted by the I CAN-SPAM Act. This has been determined in a few prior cases, including my own. (See http://www.barbieslapp.com/spam for some of those cases.)”
003.bmp
Furthermore, if you don't take me serious just keep doing it because as of now you'll owe me at least 2 grand for these 2 messages along with the other 65 I got in just one day on my blog and I'm keeping track and warning every single one of you and I'm hoping you continue so I can sue. I can use the money.
Just stop , we're not *(&^%&^ stupid out here. Smarter than you, believe me.
Chicago Ray
Chicago IL 60090
____________________________________________________
Time consuming yes, a little deceptive, perhaps but not as much as they, effective, almost 100% after the 1st email….just a thought…
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