Begin The Spam Wars

After happily blogging for 8 months, I finally got hit by comment spam on my blog. In the back of my mind, that was always a threat but somehow I avoided getting hit by it because my blogging system is relatively old. My blogging system wasn't very popular at the time, so no one targetted it with spam.

For those who don't know what comment spam is, it's when someone leaves an unwanted advertisement in your blog's comments. A lot of times, the process of comment spamming can be automated by building a computer program to do it for you. There are several reasons why some jerk would want to do it. Firstly, it boosts their own website's ranking in search engines. In general, the more links pointing to a website, the higher the site's search ranking will be. This is a huge deal since 80% of people use search engines to find sites. The second reason is that it's free advertising. The advertisement usually contains a link to the spammer's business website or something, so that's another way he/she can attract visitors to the site.

In either case, two weeks ago, my website has been desecrated by the invasion of a comment spammer. I deleted the comment, but they returned a week later. So, begin the Spam Wars we must. I have a war chest of anti-spam tools, but the spammers also have sophisticated tools to cancel out those tools. It is essentially an arms race. It sucks how some people take advantage of open content websites like blogs, where anyone can express their ideas and comments.

In either case, I'm going to slowly step up my anti-spamming procedures. Each time the enemy strikes, I will kick it up a notch.

It is on! You messed with the wrong hacker! In the words of Yoda, "Destroy the [spammers], we must."