Comment and Trackback Spam

I moved my other website, The OS Quest, to a new host at the end of March. It was an event that showed just how much comment spam it was getting. The site  had been up five months just prior to the move and hit 100 pieces of comment spam just before the move. The volume had been steadily increasing as more and more pages were indexed by search engines. We went online at our new home in April 1st, the counter was reset to zero, and tonight the count stands at 171.

The Akismet anti-spam plugin has done a great job stopping the spam. It only let one through and that was held for moderation because of all the URLs in it. Since the comment looked a lot like the ones that were stopped I suspect the Akismet servers were busy and skipped processing the comment. The Akismet service is free for personal use but the processing is at a lower priority those using a commercial licenses.

I’ve noticed that most of the spam attempts are hitting one posting. I’m considered turning off comments for that post but I decided against it for now. Of more concern was I got my first piece of trackback spam. Hopefully it’s not the start of a trend.

The colume of spam my GMail account is receiving has also spiked. Since March 17th, which is when I deleted all current spam, I’ve received 318 spam messages. All but one was stopped by the GMail filter. My GMail account gets little that’s not spam, but what real mail it has gotten has been let through.

The Spam Chronicles has barely hit the search engines so it hasn’t atttracted any spam yet.