Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Cyprus Mail reports that environmental commissioner turned his attention towards piles of SPAM – advertising leaflets distributed by numerous companies to people’s house, mailboxes, and cars.  The initiative to regulate this is very welcome.  However:

Theopemptou insists that a law should be passed to regulate leaflet distribution in streets, cars and post boxes in order to protect the public and prevent the pile-up of waste. One possible measure he recommended was the creation of a special stamp that people could put on their cars, which would indicate that they do not wish to receive advertising material.

I think that SPAM should be opt in, not opt out.  In other words, it’s the people who WISH to receive the advertising leaflets should indicate that they want to, not the other way around.  You can see how well it works in email vs. RSS and Twitter.  In emails, people just send you loads of junk with an option to unsubscribe from it.  First of all, you already received the junk. Secondly, you need to receive the junk to get an option to unsubscribe.  That’s just not fair.   It doesn’t work.  Opt out.  In RSS and Twitter it’s the opt in.  You don’t get anything until you actually subscribe or follow.  Which is all up to you.  And that’s how it should be.

Dear Mr.Spammer,

you are the ugliest and stinkiest piece of human trash, abusing the technology, annoying people, and occupying their valuable time with your silly activities.  Please stop. Now.  If you feel like  you have nothing much else to do, feel free to go to the darkest corner of our  planet, and die!  I hate you.  People hate you.  Computers hate you.  The universe hates you. So, pretty please, with sugar on top, cease to exist.

P.S.: None of your comments will make it to my blog.  Thanks to Akismet, Gmail, and PHP and Perl.

P.P.S: I really hate you very much.

Lorelle has an excellent post covering spinning spam – “Spinning Spammers Steal Our Blog Content“.  As always, the article is full of useful links and insightful quote.

Here is a quote from a linked article – “Protecting Your Content From the Spinning Spammers” – describing the issue:

 [...] process of modifying the content before reposting it is often called “spinning”. Spinning a work before republication has several advantages, the largest of which is that Google is less likely to detect the work as a duplicate and, thus rank it higher. However, almost equally important is that it is much harder for victims of plagiarism to detect and follow up on the misuse, making this kind of abuse much harder to stop [...]

Here are some helpful tips for detecting the stolen content:

1. Digital Fingerprinting: Digital fingerprinting is a process by which you append a unique word or phrase to the end of your posts in your RSS feed. If the feed is scraped, so is the fingerprint and searching for that string of characters tells you which sites have taken your content. Since fingerprints don’t have easy translations or synonyms, they remain intact through the spinning process. Plugins such as the Digital Fingerprint Plugin and Copyfeed can automate the process.
2.  Trackback Monitoring: As was the case with Tony’s original post, spam blogs often leave links in the scraped post intact, even as they modify the copy. They often send trackbacks to those URLs in a bid to get extra incoming links to the spam blog. If you link to your own articles when writing, you can watch the trackbacks and get an idea for who is using your content, even if it is spun.
3.  FeedBurner Tracking: FeedBurner offers a very powerful “uncommon uses” feature that tracks where your feed is published. Since FeedBurner does not depend upon the post content to track the feed, spinning the text will not fool the system.

I tried digital fingerprinting coupled with monitoring a few times and I have to say it works pretty good.  The way I was doing it though, was on a per article base, not for the whole feed.  I noticed that when my content is stolen, usually just a few articles are taken – presumably those with high ranking keywords.

So, what I do sometimes is invent a new word (wordativity anyone? blogalerting?), stick it in the post, and then setup Google Alerts for this word.  The moment Google indexes something with this word, I am notified either via an RSS feed or an email.  (If you feel really paranoid, you can create a new Twitter account, pipe the RSS feed to that account, and folow it with your main account, so that you get an SMS when stealing occurs.)

Anyway, check the above links for more information about the problem, some insight into legal point of view, as well as how to handle the cases when this happens.  And spread the word too.

Anyone who had ever wrote more than 3 lines of code will tell you any time that all software has bugs. That’s just the way it is.

And while I don’t need any reminders of this fact (mainly due to me writing a lot of code at any given week), I got one special today.

A SPAM comment was posted to this blog, although you haven’t seen it because it went to moderation, that was clearly a result of a bug in SPAM software. The message contained a long list of phrases like ‘Thank you’, ‘Very interesting’, and ‘I bookmarked your blog’. Obviously these are intended for link SPAM. But they were supposed to be used one at a time. Oops.

It’s been less than a month since I installed SPAM Karma 2. It didn’t take me long to see the benefits. Just four days later I wrote this post.

Today, looking through the plugin statistics, I thought – “Why don’t I post them?”. So, here they are:

1. Total Spam Caught: 1002 (average karma: -102.87)
2. Total Comments Approved: 141 (average karma: 14.74)
3. Total Comments Moderated: 13
4. Current Version: 2.2 final r2

So, in less than a month SPAM Karma 2 saved me more than a thousand contacts with SPAM. At the same time, it stood out of the way almost 150 times when legitimate comments were posted. And only 13 times it didn’t know what to do and left comments for me to moderate. Pretty good numbers, I have to say.

False positives? None of the legitimate comments were marked as SPAM. About 20 SPAM comments got through and I had to marked deal with them manually. The shiny 2.2 update came out a couple of days ago to deal with the new wave of “smart” spambots.

As for me, I am very very very satisfied with the results. I just hope that this plugin will continue to work the way it does now. I’m willing to install upgrades.

Thank you all who participated in this work!

If I would have a choice to install the only one plugin for my WordPress (how glad I am that I don’t have to make this choice, by the way), I’d go with Spam Karma.

Last week I installed it to see if it was any good. It is. I needed just a couple of days to realize how big of a problem SPAM comments still were. They weren’t appearing automatically on my blog, but I was getting an email every time a new comment was submitted, and I had to mark it as SPAM in the admin interface. Of course, there is a shortcut ‘Mark all as SPAM’, but still, it required an action.

With SPAM Karma, I don’t have to do anything at all anymore. It checks all the comments and automatically marks SPAM as SPAM and aproves the good ones. I don’t get emails about each SPAM comments anymore. Rather a daily digest that tells me how many SPAM comments were caught and where I can review them, if I wish. For each approved comment I still get a notification – so that I could reply faster. And on those rare occasions when SPAM Karma can’t make up it’s mind, it sends me the request for approval.

In short, it works better than very good. It works excellent. And I didn’t even do any configuration what-so-ever (although there are plenty things to tweak). Just intalled it as it was.

With this plugin there is no need to use captchas or limit commenters to logged in only users. Great!

P.S.: I’ve also recommended this plugin to Michael Stepanov and he seems to like it too.

I have installed yet another SPAM fighting plugin for WordPress – Spam Karma . I’ve read many good things about it, so I decided to try. Not that SPAM is a big problem for me, but it can be even smaller.

In case you find any problems with posting comments to this blog, let me know via contact form.

… or those survey people at the door will get you, you know.

WordPress has excellent support for SPAM fighting. I was satisfied with the default functionality so far. The only thing I did was setting up pre-moderation of comments that match the list of words.

No SPAM comments were posted on the site since I migrated to WordPress and that says something. I can still remember the pain I had while using Nucleus CMS. At those times all comments were posted straigh away and I had to go find and delete them manually. That was very time consuming and error prone procedure that resulted in a lot of swear words and lost comments.

Anyway, with time I became confident of WordPress filtering and now I think that I am spending too much time pre-moderating comments. Most of them are very obviously SPAM and should be killed upon arrival automatically. Thus, I have used the bigger part of the list mentioned above to filter comments that should be blacklist. That is I won’t even see that the comment was posted if it matches one or more of the words.

Another problem that was annoying me recently is referer SPAM. I am checking the list of refering sites on a daily basis and all those SPAM links break my concentration. To solve this problem I installed the AutoBanReferer plugin.

With all these changes there is a chance that something will go wrong. Either I will be missing comments, or pages won’t be displayed, or I won’t be visiting back to your websites. Nothing in this list scares me as long as you can always Contact Me and let me know that you noticed something malfunctioning.

Where I look on the web, everyone is complaining about SPAM. “My Inbox is full of SPAM”, “I am lacking behind because of SPAM”, “My site was SPAMed” and stuff like that. I beileve that everything in the world has its good and bad sides. Such situation with SPAM when everyone is complaining about it is one-sided though. I believe there is some good to be found. Here is my small contribution.

Every time comments in my blog get SPAMed I feel good. You might think that I am such a pathetic loser that SPAM comments are the only kind that I get, but that’s not true. I am soon to celebrate a 1000th comment (that’s a hint by the way). The reason for my joy is my choice of software. Since I migrated to WordPress SPAM stopped bothering me. At all. When yet another script comes in and leaves two or three dozen comments about “online casino” or “morgage bonus” all over my posts, all I have to do is click on “Awaiting moderation” link in the administration interface, scroll down to the “Mark all as SPAM” link, click it, and than click “Moderate comments” button to submit my moderation. That’s it. It probably takes me less time to discard all of these comments than it takes that script to generate and post them. Fantastic!

But my blog SPAM is not the only kind that provides me with good mood. Occasionally, a SPAM message would get through my anti-SPAM software that protects my mailbox. Since these are usually singular messages which are easy to identify and delete, I can afford some time to look inside. More often than not they are pretty funny. Consider this one from today.

From: info@mamchenkov.net
To: leonid@mamchenkov.net
Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2005 09:01:08 -0700
Subject: Your password has been successfully updated

[-- Attachment #1 --]
[-- Type: text/html, Encoding: 7bit, Size: 0.5K --]

   Dear user leonid,

   You have successfully updated the password of
   your Mamchenkov account.

   If you did not authorize this change or if you
   need assistance with your account, please
   contact Mamchenkov customer service at:
   info@mamchenkov.net

   Thank you for using Mamchenkov!
   The Mamchenkov Support Team

   +++ Attachment: No Virus (Clean)
   +++ Mamchenkov Antivirus - www.mamchenkov.net

[-- Attachment #2: approved-password.zip --]

Isn’t it funny? First of all, I am the administrator of mamchenkov.net domain and all services related to it. So I know that this is crap even before I finish reading the Subject line. Oh, wait. I actually know that this is crap even before I finish reading the From email address, because, guess what, there is no such email as info@mamchenkov.net. And, of course, there is no such thing as “The Mamchenkov Support Team”. Or “Mamchenkov Antivirus”. That all is just pure fun! It’s like I would be trying to convince you that you are not you, but that I am you, although I am obviously not. :)

Now that I am thinking about it, I was wrong saying that the Web remembers only the bad stuff about SPAM. There was a lot of laughter on that Slashdot story about some African cosmonaut left on the orbit. And there was this poetry project that was using phrases from the SPAM messages composed into poems.

What’s your SPAM fun story?