Continual Spam Vigilence
January 18th, 2009 by Ingrid Cliff
Warning – rant coming! I believe all spammers are the greatest pests to ever have existed. They are akin to plagues of locusts and cane toads in Australia. Just like all pests they are persistent – you just get one loophole plugged and they creep in another. They are the bottom feeders of the internet world.
If you have any on-line presence you will experience the pernicious pain they represent in your blogs, comments sections and all forms on your website. You need to be constantly on guard with your security measures – ever vigilantly upgrading them.
I’ll be honest – over the holidays I missed an upgrade in my newsletter comments software and as punishment spent today deleting 4325 posts about viagra and other useless online medications. Unfortunately I have had to purge all other newsletter comments in the clean up (so apologies to the genuine people out there who have commented on my newsletter articles previously).
I have once more tightened my website security, increasing the numbers of hoops to jump through to allow true and open debate and comments.
What can other businesses learn from my experience?
- Akismet is your best friend. Make sure Akismet is installed in every part of your internet business that allows open debate. While Akismet isn’t perfect, it certainly reduces the amount of spam that gets through the net.
- Moderate every comment. Yes, I know this is a pain and time consuming, but all it takes is one spam comment to be posted and the floodgates are opened.
- Keep the maintenance up. Ensure all security and product updates are installed and functioning on your site.
- Create and stick to a regular back-up schedule. This is needed in case the whole site needs to be rebuilt after a hacking attack.
- Monitor your site traffic. This is what tipped me off – an unusual spike in visitors to an archived web-page.
Until next time
Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 6:11 pm and is filed under small business tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 19th, 2009 at 11:58 am
You’ve got some great tips there Ingrid. Sadly, this is something we all need to keep a vigilance on (even though I’m sure there’s other these we’d rather be doing).
January 19th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
This has been on my mind too. I’ve had a spate of ridiculous spam comments on my blog. The list of links on each comment gets longer & longer …. you can’t help but think about what you’d love to do to these spammers ….. I’ll have to find out more info on Akismet. Is this something that can be used even if you host your blog on your own domain?
Thank you for your post.
Elena
January 19th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
[...] offers some tips on how to handle these pesky pests. Her post was prompted by her experience in receiving an enormous amount of spam over the holidays. Heart [...]
January 19th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Hi Elena
Yes. If you use WordPress for your self hosted blog, Akismet is a plug-in that is quite easy to install into your blog. Just search the plug-ins section of the WordPress website.
The thing to remember is spam comments actually cost you Google points – so you want to stop them before they hit your page. The other thing is that many spammers will submit an innocent comment first. If you have set your blog defaults to publish all subsequent comments from someone without moderation then this is when many spammers can sneak through your net. Check your blog settings and click the moderate everything button if you want to be sure.
Happy spam elimination!