I Don't Like Spam!

And I'm not talking about the edible kind, which I do enjoy from time to time, I'm talking about the verbal kind, which pollutes the blogs and causes an unbelievable amount of grief and aggravation.

Some time ago, a plethora of bloggers got spanked by that ninny who doesn't like American women, and more than a few of us were briefly at a loss in how to deal with it. Now, I'm pretty sure that this was a one-shot thing, simply because the guy has nothing left in the tank. I believe that his blog was yanked so the only way he can post his infantile rants is as an "Anon" poster.

However, there are ways to knock down the amount of spammers that you get on your blog, and none of them are as drastic as closing your blog, although there is one option that comes pretty close.

1} Get rid of the ability for people to post anonymously. Now this is one of the easiest ways for spammer to post, and by getting rid of that option you've instantly eliminated about 33% of your spam. This blog is the only one of my blogs that people can comment anonymously on.

2} Moderate. If you don't want to do option one, then option two is your best bet. This allows you the ability not only to mark out a comment as spam, but it actually activates the Blogger spam blocker. Blogger maintains a huge database of spam ISP's and about 97% of the time will effectively screen out the spam before it actually shows up on your dashboard.

Before I move on to the other drastic options that you can do in order to cut down on the spam, I would like to take this opportunity to offer a few of my readers an apology.

Shortly after that particular spammer made his rounds, I decided to check my spam comments (all 350) to see what kind of spam I had in there since early 2011, which is when Blogger really started doing this kind of minutia. Imagine the dismay that I felt when I saw four of my regular readers's comments labeled as "spam".

The only reason that can think off for that happening, is that my computer can get incredibly wonky at times. By "wonky" I mean that my cursor will go off on its own, whether I'm using the mouse or not, and highlight a link that I had no intention of clicking on to begin with. This is apparently what had happened here, and believe, I did fix the problem by not labeling them as "spam" and thus they got published to where they were supposed to be.

So I would like to offer an apology to the following bloggers for inadvertently labeling one of your comments as spam:

Lynn
Charles Gramlich
Nurse Myra
Bea

To continue: There are two very drastic options that you can pursue in order to cut down on the number of spammers touching your blog.

3} Make a post a draft. Blogger has a feature called "Stats", in which not only can you tell how many pageviews a given post has but where the referrals were coming from.

Across the top of the screen you'll see buttons labeled "now/day/week/month/all time". Clicking on "all time" will show you short list that you can expand showing you the top posts on your blog with the most pageviews.

If you think that a post has way too many pageviews for the topic of choice (which means more than 150) and you've been able to eliminate any and all reasonable explanations for the high pageviews, means that your post is being hit by spammers.

Solution: Tune that post to a draft. Doing so instantly eliminates the url that spammers use as a referral and thus cuts down on the amount of spammers visiting your blog. I have only two pots that meet the criteria (each has over 750 pageviews) and only one post has been reverted to draft. The other has not because its one that I specifically wrote for Valentine's Day 2010 and contains my best piece of flash fiction that I've ever written.

4} Nuke the post. This is the option of last resort. If you have a post that has an unbelievable amount of hits that is out of proportion to the content of the post, then the only way to cut down on the spam is to get rid of the post. I had a post that had gotten up to almost 1800 pageviews and without knowing at the time that I could do option #3, I first wiped out all of the content to see if that would cure the problem. I waited about a week, then nuked the post.

So my friends, these are the four options that I've use with moderate success in the past four years to contend with the amount of spam/spammers that visit my blog on a daily basis. By sharing these with everyone, I hope that I can help others who may be experiencing the same thing from getting completely annoyed and aggravated.