BootsnAll Travel Community

You are probably already aware, but in the last 2 days my blog has been HAMMERED by online gambling spams, many of which are making it through the filter.

Someone linked to my blog right before then, so I suspect that somehow triggered the attack, but in case you hadn't seen it elsewhere, just FYI.

Yes, we've had a few reports about this. A few others that I've checked today are also seeing high spam numbers. Experience suggests these attacks tend to come in waves. We'll get hammered for a few days or a week then it will die down again and we won't get hit for several months. The spam filters we have on the blogs tend to do a pretty good job catching them so most people are not unduly effected, apart from seeing the spam numbers ratchet up quickly and the odd one or three getting through to actually appear on the blog itself.

We are looking at other ways of reducing the amount of spam that comes in (such as automatically turning off comments on older posts) and if this wave continues we'll look to roll those out sooner rather than later.

I've noticed this new wave of spam are all trackbacks. How is that different to a regular comment? I thought it was when someone linked to my blog, but they just look like regular comments.

Trackbacks are indeed when someone links back to your blog from their own site. However they appear in your comments area like a comment simply cos that's how they're formatted to appear. You can manually turn off trackbacks on a per entry basis, but I imagine the trackbacks are coming on old posts?

ok this is getting annoying...i am getting 5-10 emails a day about message from gambling sites and the same thing..whats the deal here?

Eppy, we're looking at ways to reduce the amount of spam that's coming in. Everyone is getting hammered right now. At the same time, most all of it is being caught by our spam filter so it's not showing up on your blog.

While we get stuff figured out, you can turn off the email notifications of comments need to be moderated since they are likely all spam anyway. You can do this in your blog admin, then Options, then Discussion and uncheck the box that says to send you an email whenever a comment needs moderating.

Perfect, thats good enough for me!

I've turned off comments for now. I think you can also turn off trackbacks only.

It's a pity because I don't often get (genuine) comments, and the few I get are appreciated. However as Hydro says it's likely to be a wave so hopefully they can be turned back on soon.

Hydro: some of my comments on older posts come from people who google them and it's a shame to lose that, but then most people will eventually catch up and comment via the newer entries anyway.

WW, were you finding that the bogus comments were actually getting published on your blog? Or were you getting a lot of emails for moderation? If the latter there'd be no need to turn off comments and potentially lose those legitimate people. You can unsubscribe from the notifications of comments and simply go to your blog and scan the moderated list and pick out any false positives that got mixed in. Then you can batch delete the spam every now and again.

Good news, everyone. We've come across a way to combat the spam-mongers. We've tested it out on some of the more heavily hit blogs and it seems to be performing well. We'll give it another day of trials and if all looks good roll it out to all blogs and life will be sunshine and roses once more.

Thanks Hydro

Yeah, I was getting a lot of emails. I usually like to be emailed with comments so that they don't slip through the net if they're awaiting moderation as I rarely check the comment section on the dashboard itself.