Jangro.com - Latest Comments in Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Scott — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:22:43 -0000

Robert, thanks for kind words.

I think these monkeys can do math and fill in CAPTCHAs, and judging by the hundreds and hundreds of registrations I get from people in eastern europe, they can register as well.

Besides, I believe pretty strongly that requiring registration on a blog is a comment kiss of death. I'd much rather clean up a hundred spam posts than turn away a single real commenter because of hoops to jump through.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Mikel — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:23:52 -0000

The same situation happened to me on a blog I used to run. I get lots of spam and lots of what looks like clean comments but very different from the post's subject. What they are actually doing is creating some related content around the link to give it a stronger value.Or at least that is what they are trying. And Akismet is not that great when it comes to stop spam. It stops also lots of really useful comments so is a tricky situation.
I am not sure what to do next.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Chris O'Byrne — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:07:37 -0000

That's okay, coldfusion, I do it all the time!

I've really struggled myself with this whole dofollow/nofollow thing. Maybe if Google had never made a big deal about it in the first place and just let things develop naturally we wouldn't have this situation with spammers. My own website uses the plugin to disable the nofollow, but I have purposely not advertised that fact to prevent the spam infestation.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Chris O'Byrne — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:08:23 -0000

@coldfusion: I believe that was MY suggestion to turn off the dofollow for a while... :)

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

coldfusion — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:00:06 -0000

Difficult decision to make as to whether to turn off dofollow.

I'd go with John Hunters comment and turn it off for a while to get rid of the spammers and then introduce again quietly after some time.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Chris O'Byrne — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:03:58 -0000

Okay, this may be a dumb question, but why not just go back to using nofollow and make a post that let's all of the idiot spammers know their efforts will be futile. You can always quietly go back to dofollow and then the people that you care about receiving the benefits will receive them. Is this a possibility?

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

John Hunter — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 13:44:28 -0000

One plugin that I like is DoFollow by Kimmo Suominen. It allows you to nofollow individual posts. So you can just nofollow some comments while following most. It is as simple as just clicking a link (so easier than some of the other plugins methods of doing this).

It doesn't really do the things you were hoping for though. Maybe they would add the features you like?

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Jayson — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:39:37 -0000

You can always make it so users have to post 3, 5 or 10 times before getting a link back, I'm not sure if that would decrease the spam though.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Vlad — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:39:58 -0000

Scott,

I meant to leave the link to the latest version of Lucia's plugin. The new version allows you to "dofollow" trackbacks immediately. Check your e-mail.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Scott — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:01:34 -0000

Thanks for that Vlad. Clearly that was written with these same concerns in mind. I'll give that a go.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Vlad — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:27:09 -0000

Scott,

I have been using Lucia's Linky Love

It may not be exactly what you are looking for, but it does help to keep the monkeys away.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Scott — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:06:41 -0000

HAHA, that's awesome. I do hope they see it.

I have used the Did you pass math captcha previously. I even published some modifications to it to fix some annoyances with it.

http://www.jangro.com/a/200...

Once I put SK2 back in and started reviewing all comments, that became unnecessary.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Kyle — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:01:42 -0000

The ultimate irony here is that your link back to the tool that the spammers used to target your blog now returns you as the top result for this exact post.

I wonder if seeing "Attack of the Comment Monkeys" will deter any of the monkeys.

This won't solve the problem, but a simple captcha plugin like "Did You Pass Math?" http://www.herod.net/dypm/
might outsmart some monkeys.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Scott — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:43:55 -0000

I don't want to require registration. I hate when I see that on other blogs. BTW, I don't think that'll help much. I get several registrations a day from spammers with .pl email addresses. I bet these monkeys would gladly register.

Blocking countries would probably have some impact. That might be worth a try.

Re: Attack of the Comment Monkeys

Jason Forthofer — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:20:35 -0000

Scott,

Looks like this post is now # 1 on that search.

Why isn't blog spam prevented by just adding a javascript handler that won't let the comment fields contain a 'www' or 'http' anywhere in the field? Seems like a simple fix to a growing problem. Sure, my name won't link to my blog/site, but is that a big deal?