Welcome to Maria’s Guides, a blog-based Web site I built and maintain to offer support and additional material to the folks who read my books and articles and watch my video training courses.
The topics you’ll see covered here include Mac OS, Microsoft Office products, blogging tools such as WordPress, and social networking services such as Twitter. I’ve written about or created video training material for all of these topics. As I work on new topics, you’ll see them covered here, too. I write about what interests me and I think you’ll find that my interests are relatively mainstream, covering the software that most people use on a regular basis.
There’s a lot of material here — I’ve been archiving content since 2004. Some of that might be a bit out-of-date for the average user, but there’s always someone using older systems or software that can benefit from it. You can use navigation bar links to zip right to a specific book or video and get information about it, as well as links to related downloads and articles. Or you can use the Topics and Tags links on the left side of the window to go to a specific topic that interests you. When using these links, remember that content is listed in reverse chronological order, so the newest material will always appear at the top of the page.
Your comments are always welcome — although they are moderated to weed out spam and abuse. Use the comments link for any post to comment about its contents. You can comment on this post if you have some general thoughts about the site. And finally, if you want support for my books, be sure to check out the links on the Q&A pages; that’s how I can receive and answer questions about a book in a place where everyone can read and benefit from the answers.
Run Software Update. Click the Installed Software button to display a list of installed updates. Compare your list to what’s shown here.
Blogging Basics: Comment Spam, Part III
Part III: Identifying Comment Spam
Part I: Understanding Comments and Pingbacks
Part II: When Comments Go Wrong
Part III: Identifying Comment Spam
One of the challenges of being a serious blogger is dealing with comment spam. While I believe that every blogger should install and enable comment spam prevention software — I use Akismet and Bad Behavior together on my self-hosted WordPress blog — I also go the next step and review every single comment before it’s posted. This ensures that no spam gets through the cracks and appears on my blog.
I also, however, review the spam caught by Akismet to make sure it really is spam. Today, on this blog, I got the usual collection of machine-generated and posted spam comments with an extra helping of comments that might appear, on the surface, to be real.
(Note: Although I originally wrote this as a stand-alone post, I realized it would make a good addition to a series I started about a year ago. So I’ve slipped it into that series as Part III.)
The Goal of Comment Spammers
To understand what a spam comment is, you need to take a look at the goal of spam commenters. The majority of comments that appear on my blogs have one or both of two goals:
Either way, the site the spammer is linking to could contain products or services they want to sell, be part of a black hat SEO project, or even install malware on visitor computers. They often have nothing to do with the post they’re commenting on. There’s no reason in the world why I’d want those links on my site. Hence, they’re spam.
Once you know the goal of these spammers, identifying what might be a legitimate comment as spam becomes easy. Here are a few examples taken right from the Edit Comments administration panel on this blog.
Empty Praise
In this first example, it appears, at first glance, that six different very friendly people commented on six different blog posts. They all have different names and different e-mail addresses and are commenting from different IP addresses. But the URL they’ve entered all starts with the same name, pointing to free blogs on multiple sites. They were all posted within 2 minutes of each other.
And when you read the actual comment content, it’s clear that it’s not real. Here’s what was entered as a comment about the post titled “AirPort Client Update 2009-01 1.0 Now Available“:
Inspirational? Opinions? Neither of these words apply to this post.
Or how about the unlikely comment on “Turning Off a Plugin’s Update Reminder“?
Not a likely comment for this post.
This isn’t the only spammer trying to fool me with complements. Look at this weird comment on my post titled “Bluetooth Adapters not the Same as Built-in Bluetooth” by someone with the unlikely name “[redacted] county limousine service”:
Huh? Move to Europe and learn languages? That’s a great way to avoid Bluetooth issues. Not.
These empty words of praise could fool someone looking for a pat on the back. Don’t let them fool you into including spam on your blog — even if their comments claim they’re going to link to you.
Questions
Another way comment spammers attempt to get attention for their spammy comments is by asking questions in the comment. What well-meaning blogger or reader can resist answering a question? Here’s a example from today’s batch of spam:
(No, the hanging character “I” is not a typo on my part. It was really part of the comment.)
Or this one:
I’ve seen so many variations on this. They often start with a complement and then ask a question that seems to deserve an answer. If the comment is approved, the blogger or a reader may answer the question in another comment, thus drawing more attention to it to make it look legitimate. Or, worse yet, the blogger or commenter may click the link created by the URL for the commenter’s name (which could look legitimate) and wind up exactly where the spammer wanted him to go.
Or sometimes they ask a question that can be answered by a link in their comment, something like “Do you know where I can find good video rentals? I’ve been using blahblah.com (with link)” The object there is to appear to offer helpful information. But is it related to the post? If it’s spam, it probably won’t be.
Links Galore!
Here’s a good example of old fashioned, link-heavy comment spam:
And one where they weren’t taking any chances; they used two standard notations to indicate links, one of which just shows up as code characters:
If you can’t identify these as comment spam, you should probably turn off the comment feature on your blog.
It’s Not a Big Deal
In this post I looked at only three kinds of spam you’re likely to get. There others. If I find good examples, I’ll cover them in another post.
I know at least one blogger who has given up on comments because of the amount of spam that comes through. This blogger is probably not using good tools to prevent and capture spam.
As I mentioned at the top of this post, I use Bad Behavior, which prevents a lot of automated spam and Akismet which captures about 90% of the spam that gets past Bad Behavior. On each of my blogs, I seldom have more than one or two spam comments mixed in with real comments to review. But the potential spam list is always long and I very seldom find a real comment there. Usually a quick glance and a click clears out all the garbage.
In the next post of this series, I’ll explain how you can configure Akismet on your WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress blog.
Learn more on Lynda.com!
If you’re a WordPress user and would like to learn more about handling spam on your WordPress.com or self-hosted WordPress account, I hope you’ll check out my WordPress courses on Lynda.com. The current titles of interest are:
We’ll likely be revising one or both of those courses in the coming months, but for now, you’ll find either one very helpful for working with WordPress.com or your self-hosted WordPress site.
And keep checking in here. As a very active WordPress blogger, I’m always offering tips on this site for using WordPress. Click the WordPress category link to find some of my recent posts.