Resisting the Urge
I changed the rules around here. The spam was getting a little foolish. Now, if you include a single link in your comments, the comment will now require a moderator’s approval. Sorry to all you legitimate posters out there. You will be approved quickly. I don’t want to discourage people from posting links, but with an average of three completely irrelevant links per comment was getting kind of annoying.
Attention Spammers: When will you guys learn? You can’t flood anyone or anything with your link-rich comments. It’s akin to shooting yourself in the foot. Had you kept it to a minimum — resisted the urge — I would have let you keep your comments and links. But, no, you have to push it to the nth degree, annoy me, and make me take action. I don’t understand this mentality very well. I do understand playing a numbers game… 1/10th of 1% still means big numbers when you reach out to millions. But flooding or saturating any market will dilute it and diminish your return. You need to target your potential customers better — try to reach people who might actually be interested. Doing so will reduce the amount of spam (keeping those against your actions off your back a bit), and ultimately will yield you better results in the monetary sense.
Case in point: If I get an email for some wonder pill, I might read the pitch, maybe even follow a link, but getting several emails about the same thing dilutes your efforts greatly, to the point that they are simply deleted and not even looked at. Same thing with posting comments. A single post with a few sentences of relevant content might remain forever, even if you do put up a single link to your favorite quote, but adding one line of pretty general and vague text (regardless of how complimentary and nice it may be) and then adding three links to unrelated crap just makes me want to remove your post or at least the links.
Now, I’m not a spammer, so don’t let me tell you how to do your job, but I have been successful in business for years and that which I am sharing here will likely help you be a more successful spammer. Pissing people off and annoying webmasters with crap isn’t a successful method of marketing. In fact it’s stupid. Nobody likes spam, governments are trying to stop you, many folks despise you and will go to any length to thwart your efforts. Why? Because you over-did it. You pushed too far and too hard. Dumb, dumb, dumb. What were you guys thinking?
Be selective in your efforts, better target your potential customers. Less quantity, more quality. Resist the urge to go overboard… it’s working against you. I’m sure most of you are just people trying to earn a living and generate some income. That’s fine. Nothing personal. So heed my advice and you will likely be more successful at it.
Fabian responds:
Posted: November 5th, 2005 at 11:48 pm →
Just block there damn IP!!! Thats what I’m doing, they post a spam comment on my site, they get a “not so” nice email and added to my sites black list, not only can’t they post comments they can’t access the site.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: November 6th, 2005 at 1:01 am →
I realize I can do that, but it’s after-the-fact. I’m trying to prevent it from happening by removing the motivational factor behind the activity — which is the ability to post links. I check my blog a lot so if someone posts a legit reply with links it’ll be approved quickly, but removing bogus posts and chasing after an ever flowing stream of spam is a real drag and it was getting to be a pain.
sfong responds:
Posted: November 8th, 2005 at 12:24 am →
Mike,
Haven’t you tried http://akismet.com/ It’s supposed to be better than any other spam control plugins!
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: November 8th, 2005 at 1:38 am →
Thanks Stanley, I may just try that.
Deb responds:
Posted: November 13th, 2005 at 2:30 am →
I just recently went through my comments and trackbacks on my site as I’d been banned for two months (long story) and I wanted to make sure everything was up to scratch for my resurrection.
Imagine my surprise when I found 1185 comments (yes. I counted) dotted throughout my blog, all of them added during the two months. I was not happy, it’s time consuming getting rid of them all and while their IP’s are banned now, like you said, you have to wait till after the fact.
Maybe someone should tell these people the virtues of the saying “less is more”.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: November 13th, 2005 at 9:10 am →
1185 comments, ugh. That would bite having to sort through that many. I’ve been having pretty good luck with tightening up my contact forms. I had one that received a few pieces of garbage everyday until I “Required” the pull down. As soon as I did that it became too much of a hassle for the errant user(s) to fool with. Nothing wrong with a little self-promotion, but by golly, they have to earn it.
Mike Cherim responds:
Posted: November 17th, 2005 at 11:12 pm →
I was checking out Jona’s post about comment spam where he’s trying out Akisment and I decided to do some more looking around. I found what sounds like another serious contender in the fight against comment spammers from some Unknown Genius which is called Spam Karma. I found out about it at Schlueterica.