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The spam fairy

Blogs traditionally suffer from a fair number of spam comments, which try (feebly) to look like real comments, but are really just there to include a link to their own website. I didn't realize just how much this happened until I changed the www.popularscience.co.uk website into a format that allowed comments on each page and got absolutely inundated - probably at least 10 spam comments a day.

So I signed up to a spam blocking service that's well-integrated with the WordPress environment I now use for that website. For months, all those comments were slammed into a holding area by the blocking service and I could see them building up more and more. But then they just stopped coming. For weeks now there hasn't been a single one. Somehow, the spam fairy is catching them before the blocker gets its hands on them.

I thought initially that this was down to a change of approach by the blocker, simply trashing the spam rather than displaying its trophies. But now I'm not so sure.

The thing is, I subscribe to the comments on this blog as an RSS feed, meaning I get alerted whenever someone makes a comment, so I can come back with a snide (sorry, supportive) reply. What is really weird is that I am still getting the spam posts here (the spam blocker isn't on this site) - they turn up in the RSS feed - but the spam fairy is deleting them before I get to the actual blog to do anything about them. They have just disappeared.

I really have no idea what is happening and where this beneficial help is coming from. Can I stop paying for the spam blocking service, thanks to the spam fairy? I really don't know!

Just to show you the kind of thing I receive, particularly because I love the wording of this one, here is the latest spam comment for this blog, as seen in my RSS reader, but which simply isn't there when I go to the blog. Don't you just love that sentence? Eat your heart out, James Joyce.


Comments

  1. simply trashing the spam how do you stop spam rather than displaying its trophies. But now I'm not so sure.

    ReplyDelete

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