Thursday, July 29, 2010

Blog Comments

I get comments on my personal blog, a lot of them, which appear to come from China. Either they are in Chinese and unreadable to me or they are in English and appear to be Chinese fortune cookie fortunes. I delete them. Does anyone else have this problem? Is there anything I can do, aside from deleting the comments one by one?

5 comments:

Tyler Tork said...

It's interesting; I have the same issue, but in my case it's Russian (and English, but I haven't checked where those come from).

I guess your blog is in a database used often by spammers in China, and mine is in a Russian database. The spammers aren't getting much mileage out of posting to our blogs, since my Russian audience is very small, as I suspect is your Chinese audience. But they don't much care.

I have logic on my blog to block these automatically based on whether the poster has JavaScript enabled. I'd tell you exactly how I do it, but it would be easier to talk to someone who knows your blogging software (I assume it's not Domino). There might just be some free plugins you can install.

I suspect the fortune cookies are test messages; they can later search the interwebz for whatever phrase they used, and where they find it, those are confirmed spammable sites.

Tyler Tork said...

Oh and BTW: "Do not place reliance in the goodwill of telephone customer service people or small dogs."

Eleanor said...

Tyler -- Thanks, especially for the advice in the second comment.

Jon said...

I get the Chinese comments as well. I run them through Google translator and they seem oddly specific for the particular blog post they're posted under... Which makes me thinK: Is this a bot? I have a word verification on my blog... Is this some poor guy's job and he's just going to sites he likes? Do I have a Chinese fan?!?!

Hmmm... questions...

I usually just delete them. I'd leave them if not for the linkage to a cheap porn site.

Paul said...

These spambots are designed to fill the blogosphere with the return URL so that it will get higher rankings on search engines. Generally they are harmless (though they may link to some awfulness), but they are clogging your server. I get a lot on my blog, and my spam filter catches most of them. I still have to deleted hundreds a day.