Stumbleupon, Spammers and Wordpress 2.5

While I’ve had a manic enough week in the office, I grabbed some time yesterday to poke around recent web stats and tackle personal email building up in my inbox. The two things I noticed?

Four out of five blog posts I’ve penned recently have been picked up by Stumbleupon users, so - welcome SU users. I hope you’ve enjoyed the articles you’ve found and have been reading - plus I hope the assistance with the Popularity Contest plugin has helped, though Alex King will be releasing a fully WP compatible version shortly.

The other thing I notice, as I sift through my email, is that the spammers were certainly out in force this week - trackbacks and comments alike. Clear out Akismet and it’s slowly but surely begins filling up again - and again, and again and again. Is there an issue with Akismet or has there just been a global increase in spam activity for the week?

Finally, I will say that I’m enjoying the use of Wordpress 2.5. The media gallery has taken some getting used to but functionality-wise and from an end-user’s point of view I think it’s bang on.

Now, it’s time for the weekend.

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I Smell A Splog - Ideahustle.com

As Keith found his feeds republished last week, I’ve found the same this week with ideahustle.com. Not only is my kenmc.com feed appearing (with trackbacks on all posts made thus far in the week) but so to is my KilkennyMusic.com feed and Devious Theatre feed.

Would Ideahustle republish a feed that has me criticise whoever is behind the adsense heavy blog? It looks to be a wordpress mu installation using ripped feeds to populate a wide variety of blogs. No link from me but check ideahustle.com for yourself.

Original KKM post that was ripped above (posted around 8:30am this morning)

1 Billion Spam Comments In 108 Days

Or so says Akismet in their latest stats update. I know that across all the blogs I run or lend a hand in authoring and managing that there’s been a serious uptake in the amount of spam comments. Hell, Squidoo even got in on the act (or squidoo pages) and are now feeling the wrath of Google because of it.

From Akismet…

Total spam: 2,044,449,936
Total ham: 131,167,720

I do know one thing though, there’s nothing I’d rather have than Akismet keeping spam away from the blogs. One of the greatest things to fit into Wordpress ever. Fact.

Spammers Using Flickr As Bait

Caught this one in the mail this morning…. bravo.

Hey, I dont know if you already know or if its the same
person, but I’ve seen your EXACT pictures on another site.
I copied the link if u want to check it out. The person is
trying to pass it off as saying that its his/hers
pictures….

who knows tho…maybe that person might be the real owner
and this flickr account you have is the fake one?

in any case thought i’d just message you to let you know.

here’s that link to that page:

http://www.meetwonderfulpeople.com/members/87956512SF9855646.php

um, i dont know if you’ll be able to see the pix, cuz the
site requires u to be logged in, the site is free
registration anyways.

laters
-Chris

Gimme a break….

Looking At The Spam Statistics

Massive percentage increase in the number of spam comments towards kenmc.com in recent months. It had taken me from October 2005 to February 2007 to amass 5,000 spam comments in Akismet.

Since that date in February (6th) to this morning, May 17th there’s been over 25,000 more comments with the current figure Akismet is spitting out standing at 31,254. Thats a fairly big percentage increase in just over three months wouldn’t you think?

Those Spammers Strike Again

Damn them all to hell….

MODERATORS - This is a test from an automated software aimed at posting to “dead” forums only. If this is not an abandoned forum we apologize, simply block this nickname and we’ll not attempt to post again.

This one (above) just popped up on KilkennyMusic.com’s forum. Upgraded to latest version of phpBB and they’re still coming… time to make a few additions to the scripts I guess. Maybe a timer check? I’m only guessing that bots are filling out forms in record time, as well as avoiding the graphic captcha. Anyone been in a similar position?

Between the increase in forum spam as well as a heavily noted increase in blog spam across the board it is getting a little tiring…

At least in this case it wasn’t extreme NSFW links….

Spam From The New York Times?

Is someone inside the New York Times trying to reach out to blogs or is there someone sitting at home spamming away, PRETENDING to be from the New York Times? Amongst the new wave of spam mails and comments I’ve been filtering come comments from the New York Times - not only on this blog but Aidan has also noticed it for HelpYourself.ie The comments look legit, there’s no links only one going back to the New York Times homepage.

Reading techscape.tv this morning, it isn’t just here the comments are appearing…

Just on another note… is anyone getting empty comments from non-existant posts via mail asking you to moderate?

Microsoft Apologises For Malware Installs

Whoever approves ads for Windows Live Messenger could possibly be looking for a new job this week. Microsoft have come out and apologised publicly for advertising Errorsafe, a known malware application, for the past few days across the Live network.

The banners inside the Windows Live Messenger advertised Errorsafe, an application that claims to detect and repair computer problems. The software is notorious because it often gets installed without the user’s permission and because it presents false security warnings that are intended to make the user purchase a licensed copy of the software. (via)/blockquote>

Microsoft’s response?

We apologise for the inconvenience and are reviewing our ad approval process to reduce the chance of an occurrence such as this happening again.

Hopefully they don’t take as long as Aer Lingus do in reviewing their handling of customer complaints. After listening to Ray D’Arcy in the office yesterday (the watchdog slot) it seems they’ve a long way to go on a promise made many moons ago…..

The Apologetic Spammer

This is a new one…

Kakabadan wrote:
Sorry, I NEED to send you this messages, because I need money for medicaments

Followed by enough links to videos to put the local adult movie shop to shame. Do they think throwing in an apology is really going to entice people to shop for viagra, porn and trawl through the dozens of links in the mail?

PHPBB And Spam

Is anyone running an install of phpBB (the forum software) that suffers a lot from visits by unfriendly spam bots? I look after three sites which have full installs of phpBB, all three are two subversions behind the latest release - but thats ok. Two of them don’t suffer any spam problems. One of them is just six months ‘younger’ than the spammed forum.

The spammed forum in question doesn’t allow the public read access unless you’re logged in. A user must also click a link in an activation email - you think that would at least work, but no! So I add a graphical captcha to the user registration forms (something that doesn’t exist on the other two), it is six alphanumeric characters strong, combination of uppercase, lowercase and numbers but it STILL doesn’t solve the problem.

What was a great automated feature has now meant there is an admin team manually approving registrations on a daily basis and deleting anywhere between three and ten spambot registrations a day.

Anyone ever have a similar problem?

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