Very Bad Behavior
By Rob Safuto on Aug 22, 2006 in Blogging, Observations, Social Media | Tags: Akismet , Bad-Behavior , Blogging , Business-Week , Spam , Tech-Beat
The Tech Beat blog over at Business Week is having a hard time with trackback spam. So much so that they’ve turned off trackbacks until they can get the situation under control.
I sympathize with their plight. The fact is that spammers will find their way into your blog at every point of entry. Comments, trackbacks and contact forms are the doors that spammers will typically try to open and usually in the order mentioned.
The best defense involves not only locking the doors, but also employing early warning systems.
You can lock the doors by enabling comment moderation on your blogs so that comments and trackbacks go into a queue before they are approved. This doesn’t necessarily stop the spamming activity. It just keeps the comments off the site while you review them. This reviewing process can take up quite a bit of time if you tend to get a lot of comments.
The early warning systems can identify spambot activity or identify entries that are most likely to be from spammers and places them in a separate area. I’ve been using two such systems in Akismet and Bad Behavior.
Both of these tools are free plugins that can work with a number of blogging systems. Since enabling both of these tools the amount of spam activity on my sites has decreased dramatically. And the amount of time I spend dealing with spam issues has been reduced to a minor nuisance.
If you haven’t employed these (or similar) early warning systems on your blog site I suggest that you do so today. Doing so will insure that you don’t end up cleaning up loads of spam tomorrow.
[tags]Social Media, Blogging, Spam, Business Week, Tech Beat, Akismet, Bad Behavior[/tags]
RisingSunofNihon | Aug 22, 2006 | Reply
I’d never heard of these anti-spam tools before. I went over to the Bad Behavior site and read up about the product — I think it sounds great! I’m actually going to try it out on some of my blogs. Thanks for the tip!!
Rob Safuto | Aug 22, 2006 | Reply
Glad to help point you to some new resources.