spam - Leonid Mamchenkov - Page 3

Fighting the spinning spammers

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.

All software has bugs

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.

SPAM protection review

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!

Spam Karma rules the WordPress world

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.

SPAM protection reloaded

I have installed yet another SPAM fighting plugin for WordPressSpam 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.