Retaliation to Comment Spam? what to do?

Look there's not much point in retaliation. Complain to spam cop, and, if they've not diddled their headers or engaged in other nefarious acts, maybe complain to their ISP, but you're probably dealing with someone who is offshore , using a fake ID and/or fraudently obtained account.

All you can do is take advantage of the anti-spam preventive measures offered by your particular blogging system.

I got that, too, and I see the Writer Beware blog got it. It isn't retaliation. He's about as clueless as they come, IMO. If you can block his IP address in your software, do it. I'm running a trace on the IP address and if I can get it to resolve to anything, I'll be reporting to his ISP.

Update: I have an LJ account, and so I checked out his LJ stuff. It looks like a splog. I've sent an abuse report to LJ.

I got it too - I'm actually rather flattered, like my little blog would do anything to further his nefarious purposes anyway.

Deleted, permenantly.

One more thing - I think this guy may be splogging manually. If he's found software to get past CAPTCHAs, we're in deep stuff. There'll be no stopping them!

I just delete it and never give it another thought.

He got me, too. Spammed one post with the same thing five friggin' times.

This happens to me off and on. The Internet is a world infested with fleas, ticks and leeches. The only solution I've found is a spray, and permanent delete.

And thanks, Cath, for pointing out that leech, I hadn't seen it yet!

Comments are not always beneficial. Often they impinge on the bloggers time.

Atomic Bear said:

I just got some comment spam from a person who is selling the "vaccine" to Suicide. While their intentions might be good, they commented on a post about a commercial for the 1980 production of Bugs Bunny in Space arena show. What did that have to do whith there comment. I don't get a lot of comment spam, but when I do it infuriates me. This person didn't list just one link to their "product", but 19 links and 4 emails. I want to go to their email or myspace page and complain.

Here is the comment (it's been taken off my blog all ready):


What do you guys do when you get a message like this, beyond deleting it that is? Write to them? Report them to sites like myspace where they have a page? Is it worth even worrying about?

Click to expand...

I got that same message and just deleted it. It is infuriating!

He spammed my blog this morning, too. Posted two such comments on the same post. I deleted both. I was tempted to send this guy and email asking him why a man calling himself "Captain Church" would use a tool to market himself that is normally used by pornographers and swindlers.

I was tempted to do the same thing, Matt. But I don't think it would do any good. If he's clueless he's already getting a pounding and has hopefully learned his lesson. If he isn't clueless, then why bother? I did post an open message in my blog, but I don't think he'll ever see it.

Report them, then either let the admin delete them or do it yourself. No need to fuzz all over it -- it happens.

Also, with some hosts (blogger, for example), you can a) turn off comments or b) force a verification process to deter spamming.

Not to be paranoid but it seems that several AW blogs are getting this spam - could it have something to do with the blog chain or comment chain?

I'm just curious, the thought crossed my mind when I it seems that 5 people from the same board are getting the same message.

I've not had the time to participate in either of the chains, so it's probably not related to that. The blogroll, perhaps?

Maestrowork: The verification process does indeed help deter spamming, but this guy got through my CAPTCHA and most likely several others. I suspect he's simply determined. The only other thing I can do is turn moderation on, and I prefer not to do that unless I get swamped with spam or abusive comments. This is the first piece of spam I've had since I've installed the CAPTCHA on that site. I get lots of attempts (a bug in my software sends notifications of attempts. Gotta get the time to fix that someday), but they all fail.

By the way, LiveJournal wouldn't do anything. They didn't consider the guy's splog to be "abusive." If any of you have accounts on other services this guy uses, do report. Some are more willing to kill off splogs.

I'm on all the blog chains, and haven't been the unlucky recipient. It's also possible that a. he hasn't got to me yet or b. my paranoia settings are high enough to ward him off. I'm also on the AW blogroll. But then, like I said, it's probably more to do with him not getting around to all the blogs yet. Yay. Something to look forward to.

I have my blog setting turned to require a verification word entered by the commenter and to allow me to approve or reject any comment BEFORE it apprears on the blog. I had one spammy comment before I turned that on but not a single one since.

Kristen

Even with word verification, I still get spam comments.

I hate spam.

When I first decided to blog (just a couple of months ago) I didn't realize there was so much to it as far as promotion. Update pings, RSS feeds, etc, a lot more stuff involved then I initially thought.

So, instead of getting a blog package, I wrote my own in php. For a while there when I was discovering I might need to write a script for RSS feeds and figure out how to ping certain sites I wondered if I'd made a mistake.

Now that I have solutions to all that, I am glad I went with writing my own code. Now, I simply check for '<' and '>' before I save a comment and display a message about 'invalid characters' if those characters exist. It means that people cannot bold, underline, etc, in their comments, but it also filters out that type of spam. (I still get random text spam, but at least not link lists).

And, the beauty is I don't have to do any maintenance on that type of spam. I am also able to check for certain four letter words to keep my comments at least marginally clean.

Personally, I think at the very least any good blogging software should allow the turning off of (at minimum) the <a> tag in the body text of the comment. It is not as if a feature like that would be at all difficult to code into a blogging package, and it could be done in such a way that the blogger could create a list of characters and words to filter.

I got that spam too. I does seem like he's following the links in the blog chain. At least the spammer didn't actually leave any live links on my blog - he just pasted the URLs.

I have CAPTCHA enabled, so this guy is apparently pasting this in by hand. That's hard to stop unless you moderate the comments.

I haven't been spammed and I'm in the AW blogroll so maybe it's random

A question - which spam cop do we report to? I googled and found a couple... I don't get spam (yet) on my blog but I do get it on my forum so I thought I'd look into reporting some of them. Whether I have enough time in the day is another matter LOL

is it spam cop or spamcop?

re: banning the ip I'm not sure that would be effective
1. lots of people have rolling ip numbers
2. serious spammers bounce requests off other computers and servers

TaliaMana said:

A question - which spam cop do we report to? I googled and found a couple... I don't get spam (yet) on my blog but I do get it on my forum so I thought I'd look into reporting some of them. Whether I have enough time in the day is another matter LOL

is it spam cop or spamcop?

Click to expand...

The one you want is http://www.spamcop.net/ , NOT spamcop . com (apparently the .com domain was accidentally allowed to lapse and scooped up by a company that sells antispam software)