There were one thousand seven hundred and some pieces of comment spam when I logged in tonight, sitting in the inbox trash.
All my email is directed to trash, comment spam is only some of the spam that I get. I’d say about 1 in 20 emails is legitimate, and I can just move them over to a folder.
MT blacklist was updated yesterday, and it won’t delete them tonight.
There is no way anyone has the time to delete each one separately, so I guess it will have to let it sit until there is a window of opportunity to delete a few hundred here and there,
Other than keeping the list updated, I have no idea how to slow down this flood.
How dare prOnographers use my bandwidth.
I wonder if a lot of other blogs got hit this hard.
There has to be a better way.
Maybe people could earn spare change clearing comment sections of blogs.
The UN says that 85 percent of email is now spam. It cost computer users 25 billion dollars last year. I went over to internet news to look up a few more statistics and blocked a doubleclick ad.
By the year 2005 98% of all email will be spam.
And while governing bodies worldwide are figuring out laws regarding email, spyware is becoming more pervasive and malicious. I know because I have a crippled computer sitting on the floor next to me.
When an ISP or virus protection company says it is the customers fault, I think we consumers need to get angry.
Looking at all that comment spam and seeing all those hijacked addresses, I know computer owners need to get smart. Spam and adware is something all of us including companies, government and users have to tackle. But at the same time technical experts need to give us the tools to be smarter without charging a small fortune.
The average home user cannot afford the time, the money or the aggravation to deal with the nuisences happening on the web. I doubt I’d recogize a legitimate business email or ad anymore if it jumped off the screen and bit me in the nose. It is like it is all garbage. It is easier to just log off and walk away.
MSN
The MSN search engine is really bad, it has just started coming up since my ISP switched to MSN Canada in partnership as homepage.
Mozilla Firefox has become my browser of choice. It’s free, it’s easy to use, and it doesn’t annoy me with things I don’t want. MSN Canada is a carbon copy of MSN US with the exception of some Can con (Canadian content) It still gives me far more US options than I want or need. It assumes I’m online to buy something, tech toys, a trip, books, cars etc. I’m not.
Bird Flu
The avian flu has returned to Asia. Four months ago 100 million birds were killed and 24 people died as a result of direct contact with infected poultry.
This time China and Thailand are reporting new cases. The strain can live in an environment for months and it is only a matter of time before it mutates and crosses the species barrier to mammals. One of the difficulties in attempts to erase this disease in domestic bird populations is that it doesn’t stop the infection of wild birds, who carry and spread the strain in migration.
Olympics
Hosting the world has it’s share of difficulties and the preparation for the games in Athens this summer is facing more than it’s share of them.
With forecasts projecting average temperatures in the Greek capital ranging from a minimum of 24C up to 34C in August, this summer’s Games could be the hottest in Olympic history.
International Olympic Committee veteran Richard Pound says that pollution, doping, construction cost overruns and delays aside, security costs for the 10,500 athletes and expected visitors is costing Greece 1.2 billion dollars. A bomb attack in a densely populated suburb of Athens this past week hasn’t helped pre-Olymic jitters.
Published 4 years, 4 months ago
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You do seem very badly affected by comment spam - I’ve picked it up on some of the entries I’ve done, Nasty stuff, some of it. You’re right about email too. Spam has turned into a real flood. I really regret ever putting my email address on a web page, but naively I said “It’s easy enough to delete a few unwanted emails”. How wrong I was!
So what is the solution?
Rachel Cunliffe is top notch and if there was a hole in this blog’s MT she’d find it and plug it.
To go from none this evening to over 1700 in the few hours I was out with friends is insane.
Not being able to delete it with Blacklist is a bit odd, but that problem occurs more often as the spam increases. So, does it venture toward the realm of a DOS?
I am very sorry that anyone who has access to the template has to face this garbage, and I apologize to you for exposing you to this exploitive soul sucking scum.
This does not make business sense for the spammer(s).
Why flood an active weblog with a couple of thousand comments? The spam is noticed and removed within hours. This is unsolicited hard core pr0n and is against Canadian law.
What makes a spammer think they won’t be reported to authorities?
Targeting active blogs seems to me to be a big mistake, let alone being short-sighted.
What doesn’t make sense either is that this blog is too insignificant to receive this level of attention from spammers. If Pereus is correct that there are 4 million blogs, I’m certainly down at the bottom in terms of traffic and hits.
Even if spamming Bene Diction Blogs On only takes a minute or two, it can’t be worth a spammers effort.
So, what is the solution?
In the past two hours there are 411 more.:^(
I wish I did know the answer BD!
WordPress has a filter that traps comments it suspects of being spam and puts them in a “waiting for approval” list. They still need to be deleted, but at least readers are not exposed to it. Maybe there’s something similar for MT?
Its not only blogdom afflicted.. yesterday, thanks to someone out west I got another 4700 attempts to send email for randomly generated users of my domain (only one to Bene though!) That was a rejection rate of 98%, and its not even 2005 yet!
I am really sorry about the deep fryer comment though Bene…
I must be frittering away my brain cells.. (ouch!)
LoL Hamster, I’m leaving it there for all to see!
I don’t let the noise in your head bother me.:^)
Now, if you’d said ‘nothing says germ-free like 700 degress Kelvin, I’d be a tad bit annoyed.
I’d like to talk to you about this spam.
I’ve put out some requests to some people so I can do a plain english post for us average bloggers.
It’s very decent of you to empathize, but if you have to tolerate that attempt, what hope do the rest of us have?
My question to you is this: are there want-to-be cyber-cops that would be able to use a situation like this to practise their skills? I’m more than happy to let them help.
Richard: My hosting company has a spam filter.
MT has the blacklist.
My ISP has an abuse email site.
That’s a couple of lines of defense.
HTML is disabled, if it was enabled MT has a code that is supposed to stop this stuff.
I’m not naive. As fast as tools are developed, ways around them are.
I took off the rebuild option on MT blacklist and broke deleting into smaller chunks. It didn’t work. So now I’m closing off archive comments.
I don’t see why I should have to do that.
A protected user name of mine has been used in one of these comments, I was threatened a few weeks ago.
All comments go into trash, but it still has to be deleted in MT too.
Bene:
These spammers drive me crazy. I’ve never heard of numbers like what you’ve been receiving.
I hope you find out what you can do to protect this site. This makes me so angry.
It is stupid and banal and over the top eh?
I’m frustrated too Darryl and me yelling isn’t going to fix this, or stop it.
I wonder if other bloggers get flooded this way?
How often?
Are there reasons why they are hit instead of someone else?
And if they do get bombed, what steps do they take?
I intend to find out what I can.
Not in technical language you need a degree for; but in practical steps so ordinary people like myself can blog without being crippled by spamm spyware or abuse.
If blogging is going to be a place where only the technically gifted or the rich can go, what is the point?
Why do we have to accept that people can take our blogs away at whim, or that it’s normal to get flooded with spam and crippled with spyware we didn’t download? It makes no sense. Why do we allow ISP’s and companies put the burden and blame on customers. Why do we accept that tech info is NOT written for someone who doesn’t speak it. I’m bloody sick of the hours I’ve spend wading through ‘help’ forums and menus this past month.
Now I have to go through every archived post, delete and close. This is NOT what I blog for!
Some scammer takes my bandwidth and treats my time like it’s dirt.
I implemented a little tweak to my MT files to reduce the comments posted via bots. (Not that I come close to the problems you’re experiencing.) I renamed the mt-comments.cgi file to something unique to me and set the appropriate file name in the mt.cfg file.
I understand most comment-spam bots are programmed to look for the standard MT comment file name. By changing the file name, that process is thwarted. It hasn’t stop manually posted comment spam, but that’s a much smaller problem and MT-Blacklist handles most of that well.
This should be an easy tweak for someone like Rachel. If you’d like, I can try and find the more detailed instuctions I used to make the change.
Blessings
God bless you guys. The mt cgi file done. Thanks Ian, Darryl, Richard and Hamster. All other practical steps are in place thanks to Rachel’s skill.
What continues to grieve me is that Dean Peters would wipe out a paid-for blog, threaten a reader,continue to mock me and ridicule the professional mediator I hired for both Peters and I and for the good of his portal and my blog. And for the good of everyone caught in those incidents.
Rachel Cunliffe got paid for this marvelous design, but she hasn’t received a penny for her help in rebuilding, and her tech support since December of 2003.
The paypal button is hers, and if you want to help, send a donation acknowledging her effort undoing the damage left by angry behaviour.
She has given countless hours.
Rachel is a professional and doesn’t need to be using her skills to keep this blog online without receiving some of the encouragement and practical help I’ve gotten from hundreds of bloggers.
I’d like to see her receive compensation for her hard work. She has never asked, has never been unkind or unavailable or reluctant. She paid a high price too.
And I’d like to see Peters find the courage to realize that mediation involves being heard, understood, respected, treated kindly. I remain convinced he needs to accept he is permitted to speak frankly to the mediator and I, and hear any apology he deserves.
He needs the opportunity, as do I.
He is permitted to bring anyone into the process he feels safe with, instead of putting Dr. Bott down in a comment made at Patriot Paradox. No one is better of for that.
As for his hurt, we can pray he’ll find the faith to step forward and accept what is offered. We can pray his fears will fade.
All he has to do is email Dr. Bott.
Mediation doesn’t dictate peace, it is there to honour his opinions and feelings and experience.
It is there to answer his questions. It is there to listern so he can be given peace. And me too.
Rachel could use financial compansation for all she has done for this blog.
I hope that every blogger who has shown me respect knows how profoundly grateful and I am and what strength you have given to me and each other.
Peters doesn’t need to be treated as he has treated me. That would be wrong.
He needs prayer to understand no one wants to take anything away from him and to find the courage to contact the mediator and try. Just try.
It has been left up to him to reach out this time.
If readers and other bloggers can help Rachel out that be a huge weight off my shoulders and maybe even hers.
Just hit the paypal button and tell her thanks, her love and support and techical skills are valued and that she is valued by many many readers and bloggers.
Firefox is indeed a wonderful browser. I use it for absolutely everything that doesn’t require IE. Unfortunately, the Weight Watchers online tracking tools require IE, and they try to load spyware on your computer, too. Thank God for anti-spyware software!
I’ve been following your journey, and I’m really sorry to hear about everything you’re going through. It really sounds like you’ve been made a target by someone who has something personally against you. You’re in my prayers, friend.
I tried Incredimail for awhile and never received a single spam junk mail. But the problem was my e-mail room at msn soon filled up and mail stopped. so I had to go to msn and delete a bunch and then I was good to go again… I am using Mozilla now and may try Incredimail again. Love your blogs
Thanks RiverStone:
I think it is just one of those vulgarities of the web and it was my turn to get hit.
Like road construction and detours.:^)
Again, it is bloggers who amaze me. They continue in patience, humour, encouragement, prayer and practical help.
Firefox is terrific, and I found about it on a blog! And a blogger gave me the router idea!
It’s been a tough month technically, but as I look at all the good that has happened its really cool.
This mess is almost cleaned up and I can get back to what I enjoy. Blog on!
I have one public email address and several private ones. Earthlink (who now owns the email addy that I started with in 1994) has a pretty good spam filter and that is why I pay them to keep that email addy active. I still get 10 to 15 spam emails a day but compared to what they catch it is nothing. I am caught in the struggle between wanting to be reachable for my 100 or so readers, and wanting to not even have to look at the subject lines of the P*rN spam out there!