Comments on: Comment Spam Poetry: A million spammers will produce Shakespeare..or will they?

By: Will

Will — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:43:47 +0000

Quite a funny post. We thought about doing a legal services blog. and launched it in a genuine attempt to offer some free advice got bombarded by spam and shut it down.

I would be interested to find out how much manual intervention is required with the software you use as this is something we would like to try again.

Regards
Will

By: Robert Nagle

Robert Nagle — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:28:15 +0000

“Iranian irritating Kenny Pearce” is the new spam creativity for today. Michael, I find akismet to be pretty effective, but the hardest part is for new commenters. Akismet will mistake a lot of new commenters for spam. If I had to start from scratch, I would forbid comments altogether unless a person registers. this does not really solve the problem.

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:23:01 +0000

As one who often goes through TeleRead’s spam to check for false positives, I have to say I’ve seen some of the same sorts of poetry in auto-generated spam.

I have to wonder how anyone could run a blog in this day and age without protection.

By: Michael Pastore

Michael Pastore — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:32:39 +0000

A very funny post: thank you, Robert. And it led me to your entertaining blog, with many good stories.

To shift to a more serious gear, I have two questions for you:

1) Even with the Akismet spam protection, is it a very time-intensive effort to keep the spam comments out?

2) How you manage snarky, rude, “ad hominem”, and borderline “nasty” posts? … Are they filtered out in some way?

Thanks … MP

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:04:05 +0000

What a fun post, Robert; thanks. As for the TeleBlog, I suspect our killed-spam count by now is probably well in the millions. David