I really wanted to post this 3 days ago, on January 10th. That would have been one year since I started recording the amount of spam I was getting over on my micro-site. I first noticed the problem in November 2018, and in January 2019 started keeping track.
This graph shows all the data from the pr...
Syndicated copies:
How is it that the saturated fats in Spam are so incredibly high, yet it doesn’t self-lubricate when cooked in a skillet?
Interesting experiment Chris. Too bad that the spam-bots found this site so fast. Especially for that reason I'm keeping the public comments on my own instance closed. What are you using for keeping webmentions to your site spam-free?
To my knowledge, there has yet to be an instance of spam within the broader community using Webmention. Of course, if it does become a problem there are community-based plugins like Akismet which have been very effective in the past. Others are also experimenting with building the idea of Vouch to extend Webmention as well.
Wikipedia describes academia.edu as a for-profit "social networking site for academics", whose misleading .edu domain name "was registered in 1999, prior to the regulations requiring .edu domain names to be held solely by accredited post-secondary institutions". For my part, I'd describe academia.edu as "a source of large volumes of annoying unsolicited email".
Syndicated copies:
Something got me thinking about comments on my website here. Almost no one posts native replies on my posts. I’d have to think that 99.9999% of all the replies on my website are now via Webmention. Perhaps I should cut off native replies just to cut back on the amount of spam I get? Hmmm….
I suspect I’m missing some context, but taking a stab: the bots are hoping you’ll accept/approve their replies so that you put their links on your page for future clicks as well as SEO purposes. Like most spam operations, they just need an ~2% response rate to make the few cents that make doing this worthwhile. I personally blacklist some of the worst offenders by domain name, IP address, or judicious keywords.
Comment spam is one of the most common forms of WordPress spam, if not the most common. Here are some anecdotal statistics for this site. During the month of November 2014, snarfed.org received 796…
I was watching my new Linux server’s bandwidth graphs closely and noticed a steady stream of about 70kbits/sec I couldn’t account for. 24kbps of that is my three DirecTV boxes sending U…
Hi, Hello. I was wondering whether you’d be interested in selling advertising space on Does the phrase “No, not even after hell freezes over” mean anything to you? The advertiseme…
This is pretty hilarious. I definitely need something like this for my site.
Syndicated copies:
Maybe I wouldn’t hate spam calls so much if people weren’t spoofing telephone numbers, pretending that they knew me based on two data points, or they didn’t so obviously sound like they were calling from the noisiest boiler rooms on the planet. If you’re going to try to waste my time you could also be a bit quicker about it.
On the other hand it is nice to get old school in person phone spam instead of the auto-dialed, pre-recorded nonsense I have been getting.
Suspicious emails: unclaimed insurance bonds, diamond-encrusted safe deposit boxes, close friends marooned in a foreign country. They pop up in our inboxes, and standard procedure is to delete on sight. But what happens when you reply? Follow along as writer and comedian James Veitch narrates a hilarious, months-long exchange with a spammer who offered to cut him in on a hot deal.
Syndicated copies:
I haven’t been forced to use it in a while, but I just noticed that six of the last seven comments I’ve left on blogs using Disqus have been marked as spam. Typically they’re well reasoned, thoughtful, and very un-spammy. The one that wasn’t marked as spam was apparently done so by the site owner them self that ultimately noticed the issue and unmarked it.
I’m at a loss as to why the system would be marking them this way, particularly given my experience with how other systems flag things as spam. I feel like I’m being moderated out of existence by a poorly written algorithm.
I wonder if the blog owners are aware of what they’re missing out on by using such a painfully dreadful system?
Syndicated copies:
I’m not sure what’s changed recently but I went from a few spam comments on my website every week to hundreds a day.
Now that I have a larger and more diverse set of post types, it’s become more entertaining to read the incongruous spam posts about how brilliant and insightful I am when I’ve just posted a simple checkin.
I thought my writing style on this checkin was great myself, but I didn’t expect to gain this type of acclaim.
Spammers are going to have to start using microformats parsers to know which post types to properly add their spam to in the future.
I did not know that that the famous Monty Python spam sketch was recorded on 6 June 1970. At least, that’s the claim of a Tumblr obsessed with Minnesota in the 1970s. (Wikipedia says only that “[i]t premiered on 15 December 1970”.) However, I need no encouragement to share a programme on Spam that I made for BBC Farming Today back in 1997, a programme that was both very well received and a blast to make. the people at Hormel couldn’t have been nicer, and the butterfly spam balls weren’t bad either.
There’s so much more to spiced ham than one could have ever thought. It’s not only a great slice of Americana, but there’s some science and interesting economics behind the things that go into making it. Both a fun and fascinating episode.
Johan Bové (Johan's Known)
Christopher Tomlinson (Twitter)
