Outsmarting Spammers

[fruity and fun]

Outsmarting Spammers

I just came across whist surfing the net and thought it might help selboy.....

Spam is a huge pain in the backside. Not only can it hurt your rankings, but it uses bandwidth, interferes with genuine conversation, and lowers the amount of trust visitors hold in you. We won't even start discussing the spam comments that are miles long, loaded full of non-English characters, and likely wouldn't make any sense if they did. The trick is to get rid of it as effectively as possible, before it gets on your site and makes a mess of things. Here are some hints

Be Stingy With Your Links.

A lot of people want to be nice and remove the 'nofollow' attributes from comment links. This sounds like a good idea, but the truth is, you can easily be found with 'dofollow' search engines and added to lists spammers use to 'identify' targets. Protect yourself by living the 'nofollow' attribute alone and give commentors links in your content instead. You'll find this easily helps build relationships and gives them more link juice as well.
You might think you can easily disguise this by using special plugins that bring up a blogger's last post, but it isn't that simple. Not only do these things often fail to work, but they can be easily found using advance search operators.

Take a Hands-On Approach

Your best defence is the human eye. Make sure all people making comments have to have their first one approved by hand. This will give you the most flexibility when deciding how you'd like to handle your comments. It also gives you an opportunity to eliminate any low quality comments as well.
Why? Simple, having to approve every comment is tiresome, but you can't just leave it wide open. The most common solution is to only approve the first comment. While this cuts down on spam, it can also leave you vulnerable to attach. If you let one slip by, the spammer will then be able to make multiple comments on your blog and not have to worry about being rejected. Even if you remove all this spam except one, they still get the link.

Change Comment Formatting

HTML enabled comments look nice, but they're easy for spammers to locate and take advantage of. In fact, as soon as they see an HTML enabled form, they know you allow commentors live links. Most importantly? They can get the anchor text they're hoping for.
You can help limit this somewhat (even if you don't have HTML comments) by setting your comment system to hold any comments with more than one link in your moderation queue. This way, you control the links and the link juice you send out.
Changing the names of your forms and the related text can also help eliminate spam. Why? Advanced search operators make it easy to find related sites that accept comments. So, instead of calling comments 'comments, use words like 'opinions', 'thoughts' etc.

Install Spam Prevention Systems

There are numerous spam fighting systems you can put into place, each with pros and cons:

CAPTCHA Verification

Those who choose to comment need to type the letters they see in an image.

Pros: Quick and easy to set up.

Cons: Images can be difficult to read, which deters comments.

Registration

Visitors must register for a name and password before leaving a comment.

Pros: You get additional data to help serve your dedicated client base. Can offer perks and higher value to 'members'.

Cons: Many visitors won't bother with the extra steps to leave a comment.

IP Bans

You can prevent people and bots from specific IP addresses from accessing your website.

Pros: It prevents the spammer from leaving comments.

Cons: Easy to work around, you can accidentally ban genuine users, you need access to your server (or a WordPress Plugin), it does nothing to prevent spammers from using new IPs or other spammers

[www.madbug.co.uk]

Great post. I created my own CAPTCHA system for my review pages and as I designed it I know it works and cannot be bypassed by spammers.

[fruity and fun]

(05-05-2011 06:53 PM)http://www.madbug.co.uk Wrote:  Great post. I created my own CAPTCHA system for my review pages and as I designed it I know it works and cannot be bypassed by spammers.

Thanx