//beconfused

This blog has far too much spam for me to handle. Now I won’t be going through the spam to pull out legitimate comments. It has just become unmanageable.

Just got this email that promises to upgrade my internet to Web 2.0. I don’t understand the email at all. It’s spam.

Hi,

Mohd Khairul Fiqri Zainuddin just visited our site and thought you would want to see this too.

the ENTIRE Internet is being upgraded and YOU can get it at NO COST.

This summer the Internet will change to Web 2.0 functionality – WILL YOU?

$1 Million Dollars being split between all who sign-up to help spread the word!
(see site details)

I wanted to reply this:

Dear Sir,

I clicked on the link and followed the instructions but my Hotmail still looked like Mail 2002. Please advise.

I would be most glad to upgrade the internet to the latest version 2.0.

Best Regards,
Mr. Dew

There are many ways of reducing spam, you can download all the plugins and start activating them. But why not just shut off comments and pings for posts that have almost no chance of people commenting anyway?

In order to reduce spam, I start disallowing comments and pings for posts before 2007 that has receive comments. Since it hasn’t got any comments for so long, it’s probably a boring or personal (not mutually exclusive of course) post so I’ll just disallow comments and pings.

SQL Statement to close comments and pings:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed', `ping_status` = 'closed' WHERE `comment_count` = 0 AND `post_date` < "2006-12-31 00:00:00"

The above SQL statement finds all the posts before 2007 with no comments and closes all the comment and ping discussion. I hope that would minimize the amount of incoming spam per day. Use the above command at your own risk, make sure you know what you are doing. You might have named the table wp_posts differently from me.

I use in on WordPress 2.3.1 (latest version).

With that SQL command, 430 of my 1663 posts have their comments and pings closed.

It's a little depressing to log in and see Akismet catch 1000s of spam per day. To date, Akismet has protected //beconfused from 142,299 spam comments. Akismet just updated their plugin too by the way.

I’ve been receiving strange comments lately. Take a look, this one tells me to drink urine:

Tom Anderson says:

Drinking your own urine is healthy. People like Albert Enstein, Gandi etc. would drink their entire morning wiz to get all the minerals, vitamins and a host of good chemicals that are just now being studied. I am a Gerontologist and found the article amusing, however please investigate for yourself the benefits of drinking your own urine if you are healthy enough to drink your own. Check my web sight at (censored)

And this one promises me lesser spam which really is very kind:

Anikrichard says:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq (censored) or write me (censored) , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Spam just got more interesting. I had a lot more spam then in the past. I used to have Bad Behavior but I disabled the plugin as I myself got banned in my blog which is just as embarrassing as you getting locked out of your own house. But I really missed Bad Behavior plugin. It just worked so well last time. It cut my spam by 30-50% I think. A much better way than endorsing a spammer’s address.

Akismet has caught 71,196 spam for me since I first installed it.

Online phishing is getting more and more common and it is important to safeguard your identity and passwords. There are numerous tell-tale signs that you can look out for. Check out this quiz by McAfee to see how vigilant you are towards internet scams. I scored a 10 out of 10.

McAfee SiteAdvisor Phishing Quiz

YOU ANSWERED 10 OF 10 QUESTIONS CORRECTLY

Rating: Safety Guru

Nice work! Your practically clairvoyant knowledge of the Web allows you to spot even the most realistic looking spoofed sites. We’re impressed!

But remember that even one misstep on a deceptive Web site can put your personal information at risk which could lead to identity theft or financial losses.

Don’t let scammers fool you! SiteAdvisor can help protect your identity by warning you before you visit a risky site.

And McAfee didn’t forget to do product plugging to and quickly pointed out that ‘Even the savviest expert can use a little help sometimes’ and recommends me the McAfee SiteAdvisor plugin. It’s free by the way.

Okay I have a lot of spam comments and trackbacks(65,661 to be exact), I usually scan them through in a weekly basis and press the delete button. My blog current has 4,666 legitimate comments and trackbacks. I get 13 times more spam than I get comments. Thanks a lot spammers.

I’ll showcase the spam. All URI are removed because I’m pissed with them.

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I hope spammer would one day realize that my WordPress blog does not support phpBB tags such as ‘[url=#]‘. It just prints out ‘[url=#]‘ all the time.

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You’re welcome, but I don’t have a guest book.

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This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title msn//winks. Thanks for informative article

You’re welcome. I get this type of comments everyday. Spambots are getting smarter. They try to see your post title and give some silly replies. Today, 5% of the comments are thanking me for informative articles.

i love your blog
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Okay, flattery does not lead to me approving a spam comment. I am so sick of this.

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Ahh, I’m so sick of this, I receive so many of these already!

You like gold? You search for gold? Then you will like this site. #

This is found in a post talking about Singapore army cookhouse food. I thought it sounded kinda cute, as if a cartoon character talking to me. Anyway, I click on delete for that too.

I said. I can honestly call fuck you right back lyrics my dad had told him. #

What?!

Hello all

Nice design on beconfused.com, good info, thank you.

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First you compliment, then you advertise.

Well, there’s a whole lot more but many are just repeats of a similar format. This blog is protect by Akismet comment and trackback spam filter and most of the comment and trackback spam are quarantined. Unfortunately there are some false positives occasionally so I look through the spam once in a while to save those comments. If you haven’t got Akismet, you really should!

It’s really annoying, I receive about 100 spam comments per day and I am not at all proud of it. Something ought to be done. I have Akismet which is a spam filter and to date, it has caught 55,734 spam comments. But I keep going through my moderation list so as to not miss out people’s comments.

A couple of legitimate comments does get caught once in a while. Maybe they should add spam into the school syllabus or something. We have CME in secondary school I remember. It’s Civics and Moral Education. It’s pretty outdated during my time and they spend much of the syllabus trying to tell you what type of festivals the Indians go to then discuss the technology-related issues.

I thought some time might be allocated to discuss about plagiarism, intellectual property, spam, Windows Live Messenger nudges, forwarding emails with curses and stuff. Maybe some internet related issues may be covered at school.