It’s amazing what you find when digging through old backups. Another item I found was my ancient collection of mailboxes for my catchall address. In early February 2007 I finally surrendered to the spammers that were hammering my mail server. There was no hint that the spam rate was going to decrease, so the catchall […]
Archive of posts filed under the Advertising category.
Comment Spam Rate
As I mentioned yesterday when I noticed I passed the 30,000 spam comment threshold, the comment spam rate on the blog has gone through the roof. I dug out some of my old backups of my WordPress database and generated this chart showing how many spam comments I’ve received. This chart is from December 14, […]
Akismet 30,000th Spam Comment
I just deleted my 30,000th comment spam. I have no idea how high the count would have been had I not put into place several techniques that automatically block bad commenters. Those that fall into my traps don’t even get entered into the Akismet system, and so aren’t counted. (Addendum 9:32pm: The count is now […]
Huge New Spam Run Starting Up
While checking my logs from overnight, I saw a huge increase in the amount of spam attempts coming in. Generally I have between 50 and 100 spam attempts per hour coming in. Yesterday, the number started increasing, and is currently running at around 3,000 rejected attempts per hour. Here’s the chart of the number of […]
“Guess who’s searching for you?” style spam is back
A few years ago, there was some spam scam outfit that would send out emails proclaiming “An individual at our website at our website is looking for information regarding: (your email address)” You’d go to the site, pay some money, and find out they really didn’t have any info about you. I received a spam […]
Frontbridge’s 88.blacklist.zap
One of my clients complained to me that some of their email wasn’t being delivered. I investigated and discovered that email to them through my server was being bounced. The error message in the maillog was: Feb 25 10:44:59 server1 postfix/smtp[607]: 852EA400001: to=, relay=mail.global.bigfish.com[216.32.180.22], delay=2, status=bounced (host mail.global.bigfish.com[216.32.180.22] said: 550 Service unavailable; Client host [64.34.170.90] […]
Ticket Sales Advertising
Since the Google PageRank storm last October, I have changed how I place ads on my sites. Some of my sites, like here on PlanetMike.com, I don’t have advertising at all. Other, like
Akismet Misses “Paris Hilton Sex Tapes” Comment Spam
As much as I love using Akismet for getting rid of comment spam on my blogs, it is extremely frustrating that for some oddball reason, Akismet rarely catches spam that discusses Paris Hilton’s sex antics. I dutifully tag them as spam, but for whatever reason, Akismet won’t learn that Ms. Hilton’s shenanigans aren’t a real […]
Extra Fields in Trackback Spam
One of my blogs just caught a spammer from 69.31.80.66 trying to submit trackbacks to the blog, with extra fields in the “Name” field. Gen Drebery’,’deber@gmail.com’,”,’63.2.12.45′,’2008-01-25 13:43:30′,’2008-01-25 13:43:30′,”,’0′,’Internet Explorer’,’comment’,’0′,’0′),(’0′, ”, ”, ”, ”, ‘2008-01-26 13:43:30′, ‘2008-01-26 13:43:30′, ”, ’spam’, ”, ‘comment’, ‘0′,’0′ ) /* The web server logs showed he was trying to hit a […]
Comment Spam Increase This Week
Has anyone else noticed a large increase in the amount of comment spam that Akismet is missing this week? I’ve tagged and deleted more comment spam in the past week than I have in the past 6 months. I would guess across all of my WordPress sites, I’m manually tagging 10 messages a day. That […]