spam

Spamalot Has Returned

Fandango15 Comments

Late last August my blog essentially stopped receiving spam comments after averaging several hundred a week for years. Weeks would go by where my blog received zero spam comments. Within a few months, though, I started getting a few spam comments a week. Maybe a handful. No biggie.

Suddenly, within the past week or so, my blog is getting dozens of spam comments a day. This morning, for example, after clearing out my spam folder last night before going to sleep, I had 65 new spam message.

Apparently somewhere in the internets the word has gotten out that I’m in the dermocosmetics business.

Here is a sampling of the spam messages I found this morning.

Hello, the payment methods on your website are very diverse and secure. This allows me to shop with confidence.
******

Hello, the discounts and campaigns on your website are very advantageous for dermocosmetics and supplements. This allows me to shop at very affordable prices.
******

Hello, the product images on your website are very high quality and reflect the real appearance of the products. This allows me to better understand the products.
******

Hello, the shipping time for your dermocosmetics products is very fast. I received my order quickly.
******

my friend tell me your website was so impressive and fitures in your blog so usefull and great please tellme how to make this beautiful blog.

Hmm. Maybe I should go into the dermocosmetics business. Apparently I already have a secure payment system, great discounts, fast shipping, and my “fitures” are impressive. Keep your eye out for Fandango’s Dermocosmetics coming to your Reader soon.

The New Normal

Fandango5 Comments

Do remember on October 1st when I posted this after going for almost three weeks without a single spam comment showing up in my spam folder on WordPress? I was surprised when I woke up on October 1st to find my spam folder filled up by 110 spam comments overnight.

I really thought that whatever changes that WordPress or Jetpack or Akismet had made to the way spam comments were handled had reverted back to the way it used to be before all of our spam comments disappeared.

But in the 13 days since receiving those 110 spam comments in one day, I have yet to see another spam comment show up in my spam folder.

Zero. Spam. Comments!

I guess this is the new normal

FBI: Spam Killer

Fandango23 Comments

Okay, yes, I admit it. Sometimes I can be like a dog with a bone. I won’t let go. I’ve been this way with regard to the recent disappearing spam phenomenon. I’ve been going back and forth with the happiness engineers insisting that something has changed, that something is different. I’m tired of being told nothing has changed other than I’m getting less spam than I did before.

In my last contact with the HEs, I wrote…

In the middle of this month, suddenly my daily spam comments dropped from double digits to zero on most days. I know spam comes and goes and the daily fluctuations can be significant. But I never remember a time when I was consistently getting no spam comments day after day.

I’m not the only blogger who has had this happen. I may be the only one who has contacted WordPress about it, but based upon comments I’ve received to several of my posts on this matter as well as posts from some other bloggers that I’ve read, others have seen the same fall off from dozens of daily spam comments to zero.

I'd be delighted if suddenly all of the spammers who used to comment on my blog have, all at once, lost interest in me or saw the error of their ways and gave up the spammer life. But I doubt that’s the case.

Well, I finally received the definitive answer today.

I actually think the FBI may have helped you out here! https://www.fbi.gov/news/ stories/fbi-partners-dismantle-qakbot-infrastructure-in-multinational-cyber-takedown.

At the end of August they took down a large botnet that was being used for all sorts of malicious purposes. I would strongly suspect that this botnet was involved in posting large amounts of spam, and the spammers have not yet recovered from it.

So now we know. It’s not that any spam-related changes were implemented by WordPress or Akismet or Jetpack. No, it was the crack Federal Bureau of Investigation that disrupted and dismantled a malware and botnet farm, and that is the reason why we’re getting no more spam comments in our spam folders on WordPress.

And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to Brooklyn that I’d like to sell you.

Spamalot Not

Fandango24 Comments

After nearly three weeks of receiving zero spam comments in my Spam folder, this morning I received two:

Unfortunately, one, from Jim Everett Table Toss, was a legitimate comment. The other, from NoseyPepper, was not. It was actual spam. So Akismet got 50% right.

A week ago, I wrote a post wondering why my blog, which typically gets maybe a dozen or two comments in my Spam folder each day, was not receiving any spam comments at all. I posed the question to the Happiness Engineers and this is what I was told…

Having no spam in your comments section is indeed a good sign. It suggests that the Akismet anti-spam feature on your WordPress.com blog is working efficiently. Akismet is designed to filter out spam, so it’s doing its job if you’re not seeing any.

The lack of spam comments for a day just means that there weren’t any spam messages that attempted to get through, or if there were, Akismet successfully blocked them.

Rest assured, I have skimmed through the approved comments and didn’t find any potential spam. Therefore, it looks like everything is running smoothly.

No, no, no! “I’m not going to rest assured,” I wrote back. “Up until about a week ago, I would typically receive a dozen or more spam comments and one or two trash comments a day. That gave me some assurances that Akismet was doing its job. Then all of a sudden, starting more than a week ago, zero spam comments, zero trash comments. Something has changed!”

At one point last year I started getting hundreds of spam comments a day in my Spam folder. One of my fellow bloggers suggested that I set my comments to “Automatically close comments on posts older than 30 days.”

After changing that setting, the comments in my Spam folder immediately dropped from hundreds to a dozen or two a day. Until a few weeks ago that was pretty consistent, with several legitimate comments I had to pull out and manually approve each week.

Later this morning I removed that restriction, figuring that if any post I published on the blog over the past six-plus years could be commented upon, my Spam folder would fill up. But no. Other than the two that I mentioned at the top of this post, there have been no new spam comments.

Meanwhile, I’ve sent some follow-up messages to the Happiness Engineers, but they seem to be ignoring me!