Recently in Spam Category

A few days ago, I wrote about a splog over on wordpress.com that I had reported a number of times that, after a pair of "Report as Spam"  and a support ticket still remained online.  It took three hours after blogging about it but it finally came down.

Folks have written that wordpress.com is as spam free as possible.  In fact, Matt Mullenweg recently commented that they've removed over 800,000 such sites from the service, 24% of all blogs created on that site. (I agree with the commenter.  The math is off.) That number seems rather low to me considering that numbers between 50% and 77% get used all the time.

I've questioned this in the past a number of times as it really sounds like PR coming from Automattic. (And if you haven't figured out yet that anything coming from Automattic should be questioned, you may want to give that some thought.) Simply going around the site with their Next Blog link in the admin bar will usually show a number of splogs.  I've always reported them in the past.

Here's something else I've been doing.  I've bookmarked every splog reported since the middle of January, 2008.  I have a list of 917 splogs located on wordpress.com that, having just checked a large random sample of them, appear to be mostly still on line.  Nearly a thousand.  You would think that a site that's going around and stating how anti-spam they are would have deleted them a long time ago.  Guess not.

Here's a sampling from that list.  These are 70 that were reported this past weekend that as far as I can tell are still online as of today.  They've all been marked with nofollow and noindex so they won't get any credit from me.

I wonder how long it'll take for someone to catch up on these.  I also wonder what the problem is this time.

edit: Here's another one.

For the longest time, I've been getting comment spam from the IP address 66.36.243.204, an IP address belonging to HopOne, a hosting company based out of Virginia.  It's always been the same address, they show up every couple days, spam a bunch of posts with their unwanted comments, and then I won't hear from them for a bit.  We have other IP addresses from these folks on record for comment spamming as well.  I've complained a couple of times but wasn't able a ble to a few days ago when they did their run.  HopOne's complaint form locked me out saying that I had already complained about the IP address is question.

Please kindly think about that.  They don't want to take a complaint because I've already complained about that specific IP address.

Wouldn't it just be easier to actually deal with the complaint and look into the matter?  Guess not...

Well if they don't want to take a complaint from me, I guess I don't have to take traffic from them.  I strongly encourage folks to place the following deny blocks in their site's .htaccess file so to block abuse from those folks.  Maybe they'll take the hint someday.