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I have recently changed a blog over from "open comments" to comments only by moderation. I did so following a blizzard of trackback spam comments from sploggers that were automatically posted to my blog.
having changed my comment settings to "moderated" I can now religiously check out the link of every trackback before I decide whether or not to post it or spam it.
Are others being watchful for trackback comment spam from sploggers too?
I have mine set to "comment author must have a previously approved comment" and this works well. I am getting those trackback splogs, something like "abc had an interesting post today, here's an excerpt..."
Since I never approve those, they never have a "previously approved" comment, but I do like to have people I've invited at least once to be able to comment without barrier. I do as you say, and check the link of every trackback.
"comment author must have a previously approved comment"
OOPS! I should have specified that I use that setting too on one of my blogs and that it works very well.
I will never set my blogs again to allow anyone to comment. When I first began blogging at Blogger the result of not setting up comment moderation was that during a 2 day holiday I took from my blog spam as well as bigoted, racist, obscene and hateful comments were automatically posted to my blog. I was horrified when I returned and found them.
Now sploggers are using comment trackbacks to spam our blogs and give them underserved credibility for posting excerpts from our posts on their splogs ... sheesh. :(
i haven't had much of a problem at all on my main blog (i don't moderate at all). The trackback spam i have seen has been caught by Akismet, so that's good. I did recently take the step of closing all posts more than 6 weeks old, and that has cut my comment spam to almost nil.
Basically, i don't think my blog(s) are high profile enough to warrant much trackback spam. The topics tend to be very mundane, uninteresting, but not easily categorized.
It must be targeted. I get hardly any trackback spam on my busiest blog, but quite a lot on runningthroughrain.
Yes indeed. It's targeted at personal development posts. I will email later with more to share.
I've had this setting since day one because it's the one I'm most comfortable with. Better to have comments delayed than comments you don't want. I've been able to filter out some really awful stuff and - lately - lots of spam that way.
I have a lot of trackback spam, and I've been successful a couple of times having my content removed by leaving a comment or contacting the splog-haus. Most of them show in Askimet, where I can click through, notify them, but it doesn't appear on the site.
The posts that have the worst splog harvest rates are anything to do with health or cancer. (Which is pretty dang obnoxious!)
What are splogs? I've had comments that were just "[so-and-so (never my name)] had an interesting post today heres a quick excerpt:[quotes an entire post]". I used to delete them as spam but recently I haven't been bothering because I didn't see any harm in them. Are they dangerous?
They're not dangerous. Splogs are blog scrapers that steal content from other places like your blog and put it up either as snippets or whole posts on their blogs and surround it with advertising in order to make money. They're illegal, and the web hosts have to delete them if the copyright holder (the original authors) complain.
Some porn sites and such will leave trackbacks like that, just so you go visit their site and see their ads or porn. Delete those.
Oh, OK. I'll know what to do in future. Thanks for the explanation!
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