I've been experimenting with some blog related changes over the last six months. My first change was spending some extra time working with bloggers spam filter. Initially this took significant time. I went through the old comments and tagged the spam as spam for the filter. It seems that this strategy is working out. Blogger now catches 99% of the spam before it ever hits the comments.
My most spammed post seems to be one from 2006, Electing Dinner Guests. I have no idea why this is. For some reason this post gets hit with a ton of spam attempts. In fact most of my spammed posts are older ones. I don't know what possible good this does for a spammer since I doubt any of my readers have visited that post in the last 7 years. I've been marking ALL spam as spam regardless of how old the post is and it seems to be helping.
The filter catches most of the spam before I ever see it and that's a good thing. Now I spend less than 5 mins a week dealing with the spam filter. I can't be sure but I think that the filter "learns" as it goes and is doing a better job stopping the spam. If you're running a blog of your own, it seems to be worth the time to use the filter and to tag the spam from the old posts.
For Q1 2013 I started a experiment of posting on average at least once per day. This has boosted my daily hits by about 500%. Which is a good thing. Comments are still pretty rare so while viewer ship is up, participation still lags behind. I assume this is due in part to the fact that: 1. I seldom comment on other peoples blogs, at least not as much as I used to, and 2. Most of you dropping by are friends and share similar views and are basically dropping by to see whats going on and waste 5 min of time between meetings at work.
Thanks for all the new traffic. I will be returning to my increased posting routine this week. I had wanted to leave the Game Case Study post near the top of the blog to see how much attention and advice it would get. I think everybody that wanted to sound off on that has. I may update information on the post from time to time as the situation develops.
"My first change was spending some extra time working with bloggers spam filter. Initially this took significant time. I went through the old comments and tagged the spam as spam for the filter. It seems that this strategy is working out. Blogger now catches 99% of the spam before it ever hits the comments."
ReplyDeleteThanks, we appreciate your efforts.
"My most spammed post seems to be one from 2006, Electing Dinner Guests. I have no idea why this is. For some reason this post gets hit with a ton of spam attempts."
Spambots targeting posts with particular keywords. This one has a lot of political keywords like "Presidential", "election", etc., which would attract a lot of hits from search engines...which in turn would also attract a lot of spam.
"In fact most of my spammed posts are older ones. I don't know what possible good this does for a spammer since I doubt any of my readers have visited that post in the last 7 years."
Spambots don't care how old a post is, only that it would show up in a search engine.
"I can't be sure but I think that the filter "learns" as it goes and is doing a better job stopping the spam."
It's the "Spammer Dance" -- spammers keep coming up with ways around the filters, while the anti-spam programmers keep finding the holes and plugging them.
It's like the do-not-call list on the phone -- 99% of the companies who used to call no longer do, but there is still one or two a week who don't bother with it. You can always tell if you interrupt their opening spiel with a "What is the name of your company?"; the spammers will immediately hang up.
"Comments are still pretty rare so while viewer ship is up, participation still lags behind. I assume this is due in part to the fact that: ...Most of you dropping by are friends and share similar views"
No, we're just aghast at your views and they leave us speechless.
;)
"No, we're just aghast at your views and they leave us speechless."
ReplyDeleteGood I was afraid that I was getting old and uninteresting.
Old, maybe.
ReplyDelete#2 "Dropping by to see what's going on...."
ReplyDeleteFT
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you are still around.