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The bane of SPAM!!
Monday, January 26th, 2004
I have to explain from the outset that when I talk about spam, I’m not talking about potted meat. It’s important that I clarify this, because my father-in-law is one of the few members of the SPAM Fan Club…and he might take offense.
So, with that little jargon-hurdle out of the way, let me just tell you how frustrated I am by spam!!
Every so often, I take a stroll through some of my archives to see comments and such that may have gotten past me…usually from friends who have also searched the archives and left notes in previous entries. Since these aren’t on the front page, I have to do a little digging. In the process of doing this, I inevitably come across “comment-spam.” This basically means that websites and companies (in this case, companies selling equipment to enhance certain organs on the body) send comments to my website that promote their nasty products and include links to their nasty sites!
I was doing a decent job of finding them earlier, but inevitably a few of them would get by. I’ve probably deleted about 10 of them by now, but they seem to have set a bead on this webspace, so I had to hunt for something more effective.
For those of you running MovableType, you will be very interested in MT-Blacklist a plug-in for MovableType that not only blocks spam from your site, but goes back (if something has gotten through) and cleans out your comments. I just downloaded and installed it a few minutes ago, and it seems to work great.
The trick, though, is keeping an up-to-date list of blocked sites. You have to add a list of blocked sites to your app, and it will then search out your site for those url’s. So, it will still take some work, but please give me a heads up if you see anything questionable in the comments.
As for e-mail spam, I would suggest doing what I do: I have a junk e-mail address on yahoo that used to be my main address. Now, when I sign up for anything or buy anything online, I use the junk e-mail address for that information. I think that address gets like 400 or more junk mails a week. It’s insane, but at least it’s not coming to my main address.
Spam is always going to be with us. I just wish there was an application that would respond to each comment spam by sending a little app that would explode the spammers’ servers into potted meat!
Are we there, technologically, you think?
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