Silly Spammer Cooks His Own Goose

Every blogger gets spam comments and of course this site is no exception. My commenting software catches a lot of them just because of words they use or certain patterns in their text, but now and then junk gets through.

Of course the minute I notice one I'm going to change my code to block any comment that contains the site they want to advertise. That's easy: I just add the reference to a file that my comment code consults when it is checking to see if it should be blocking spammers. At least then they won't be spamming us with that particular site again. It's a short term strategy; these sites come and go almost over night, but there's no reason for me NOT to block them, so I do.

I never bother to check their actual sites, but this morning I did happen to visit the page a spam commenter was trying to advertise. He (or she) was using a Blogspot page but had not yet put anything related to his spamming on it. I imagine this is a technique to cut down on their being banned instantly - start off with innocuous content, change it later? Maybe..

Anyway, I clicked on "View My Complete Profile" (a standard Blogspot link) and to my absolute delight I found a long list of this spammers other blogs! That's like finding buried treasure - I immediately plopped every one of them into my spammers list. Should they decide to spam me with one or more of those in a new comment, I have beaten them to the punch - they are already blocked.

So nice of them to help me out. I really appreciate it.

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Fri Jan 2 00:48:46 2009: Subject:   NickBarron


Well it is Christmas time ;)



Fri Jan 2 00:50:45 2009: Subject:   TonyLawrence


That explains it :-)



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