In August, the comment section of this blog was hit with 13,000 spam messages, which was at the low end of its normal 25k-35k range. At least this is what Akismet tells me. The number of actual comments is usually in 30-50/month range, I think.

In September, my comment sectionss got 186,998 spams. This has driven up my hosting costs rather spectacularly.

My host, MediaTemple.net — very reasonably priced, a little geeky to use, which is not a bad thing — pointed this out to me. I started checking my WordPress plugins and only then found out that my Akismet API key was no longer valid. I have no idea why it stopped being valid, or when that happened, but I’m hoping it was at the beginning of September. I have reenlisted in Akismet.

Being a dolt, I don’t know if using a comment spam filter like Akismet will reduce the hits on my site, or whether it will simply lower the number of bogus comments I have to manually wade through. I will check tomorrow.

I am also willing to accept ideas today.

(I have temporarily closed comments on posts older than 14 days. Sorry. But it’s not like I get a lot of those.)

UPDATE, that afternoon: The support person at MediaTemple suggested replacing Akismet with WP-Spamshield, and adding WordPress Spam Cleaner to get rid of existing spam. He also suggested this helpful article: Hardening WordPress. Thanks, Media Temple support person!

UPDATE, two days later: My comments traffic has dropped down to its usual trickle. Whew! I’m now going to turn back on the ability to comment on posts older than two weeks, and will see what happens.

2 Comments »

I just received about 100 bounced messages indicating that I have apparently spammed much of the world with a message in which I state I am a lonely Russian woman who just can’t wait to meet you.

This isn’t the first time my email address has been abused this way. Is there anything I can do about it?

[Tags: spam spoofing ]

11 Comments »

From the Spam Pile (Category: Self-Disproving):

Hello, my name is [redacted] and I am an internet marketing specialist. I was looking at websites under the keyword playing cards and came across your website http://www.hyperorg.com. I see that you’re not ranked on the first page of Google for a playing cards search.

Nice targeting, Mr. Redacted! As a quick look at my blog reveals, I am heavily into playing cards. I am a playing card fanatic, a playing card speculator, a playing card industry watchdog. Why, my readers are exactly the Influentials anyone in the playing card industry would want to reach.

Sheesh.

[Tags: marketing spam ]

5 Comments »