Tag: Comments

Trolls

trolls

Troll /trōl/
noun: troll; plural noun: trolls
Digital Technology. Informal.

  1. A person who posts inflammatory or inappropriate messages or comments online for the purpose of upsetting other users and provoking a response.
  2. One who posts a deliberately provocative message to a newsgroup or message board with the intention of causing maximum disruption and argument.

This is probably a rant post, which I veer away from posting on this site. But I really need to get this out of my system right now.

Trolls are so abound the internet, may they be in pages and/or topics such as politics, motoring, games, gadgets, and now even chess.

There are rumored cases of paid trolls, and there are also cases of just plain stupid people with nothing else to do worthwhile.

Has Akismet Really Been Smart?

I don’t know about you but at least in the last six months I received comments obviously are spam past through Akismet anti-spam filters. Even the akismet stats, I don’t think they’re telling the truth about how many spam they missed –the ones I manually marked as spam. The numbers are just definitely way off the count that I everyday mark as spam.

The missed spam –these are comments that all have to only say, “they liked my website”, “I have the best website”, “they’ve subscribed to my RSS feeds”, and sometimes asking “they can’t understand how to subscribe to my rss feeds”, without adding any single value whatsoever to what my post was about to which they are commenting. They are usually coupled with strange names and url’s or domain names that looked really bogus (e.g. insurance, some medical drugs, etc.).

I love your website.

So do I, now what? Do you want me to visit yours? No way!

I enjoyed your website.

Really? I hope you enjoy more!

Or maybe, the reason these comments go past the Akismet filters is because other people just simply approve them for their own blogs without second thoughts. And Akismet is left confused, don’t know what to do with the same ip address, name, email address, and website url.

Yeah, I’ve seen some comments like these published in other blogs.

Maybe the blogosphere has become too crowded that rendered anti-spam filters like Akismet ineffective.

A Math Challenge Plugin

Spam comments has always been a problem in the blogosphere. Akismet and Spam Karma 2 are two of the most common spam protection plugins for wordpress blogs. What these plugins do, however, is simply catch spam comments and put them in queue for the administrator’s moderation.

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments, promoting commercial services, to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly-accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

Source: wikipedia

Spam comments are usually done through a program and/or machines. They are normally automatic once they’ve bookmarked your site. Now, although Akismet and Spam Karma 2 catch those spams and prevent them from being posted directly to your comments, they do not prevent them from reaching your comments (worse, they don’t cook them for breakfast! hehe). They help keep spam from being published, but not from reaching your comments.

As a result, you’ll need to check your admin panel regularly and browse through the captured spam comments for any erroneous catch. This is surely irritating, especially if you’re encountering an average of 10 to 20 spams per day (much worse is the case for other more popular sites).

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