Friday, November 14, 2003

Bloggers getting spammed

It's happening more and more frequently: blogs suffering from spam attacks. One popular method is to hit all the commenting services with spam that repeats on the blogs using the commenting service. A comment will appear to a blog that seems to be legitimate but somewhat puzzling because it isn't quite relevant to the blog topic. Or, the comment will simply be "Yes, I agree completely with that." The link back, however, will be to a porn site or gambling casino.

We had this happen to us at Blogger Blog yesterday with a half-dozen comments left that linked back to something called Norsk Porn. We had to go to the trouble of going to our control panel at the commenting service and delete the comments.

It seems more and more like a good part of the day is spent wading through and deleting spam from our various email boxes. Now we have to do the same with commenting. If ever a segment of our society needed to be taken out and lynched, it is the spammers. At this point it is estimated that over 50% of all email is spam. On my computer it is more like 90%. Think of the bandwidth wasted and the dollars this is costing. But wait. Spammers will think of ways to make life even more miserable for bloggers. Spamming your comments is just the beginning.