I get more than 23 spam comments here for each legitimate one. Spam filters catch most of them, but occasionally one slips through and I have to delete it manually. And once in awhile, a legitimate comment gets tagged as spam, so I have to rescue it. (Sometimes I miss those and they get deleted. If I did that to one of yours I apologize.)
Oh, how I hate those parasites.
In case you’re not aware, comment spam is valuable because Google and other search engines rank sites based on how many other sites link to them. Google tends to filter out any site that’s just a bunch of crappy links, so just making sites solely for that purpose is a waste of time. But a link in a comment from a site Google considers legitimate (this site has a Google page rank of 4 out of 10, which is not too bad for a blog with a limited audience) does count. Enough such links, spread out over the internet, gets a site onto the first page of Google search rankings and decreases the cost of purchasing ads.
That’s worth money, so scumbags write programs to scour the internet, finding sites where automated comments can be entered. They are often written to look kind of like a generic nice comment, such as “Excellent points. Keep up the good work!” with hidden links. If you write a real comment that looks generic like that, it’s likely to end up in the spam filter.
Sigh. Sorry for the non-art post, but it’s kind of frustrating.
Wow. Everyone has to stay up on IT, even the lonely art prophet. Thanks for explaining this, and good luck. BTW, I tend to get less spam on my Mac. Does the program you use to host the blog make a difference?
Janet, the IT-a-phobe
Janet,
I use a Mac, too, but this site is located on the servers of an internet hosting provider. That way, the site doesn’t go away when my computer isn’t on.
The program it runs on is called WordPress. While WordPress can run on a Mac if you set things up right, the hosting provider runs the blog using a set of Unix programs (Mac OS X is technically a version of Unix, but this is a different version known as Linux).
The program the blog runs on does make a difference. In this case, I use a couple of different spam filtering plug-ins (add-ons to WordPress) to reduce spam. That helps a lot, but they still get through sometimes.
Sigh.