Livejournal, Dreamwidth, and spam

[edenfalling]

One thing I really like about Dreamwidth is the lack of spam comments. I think that, in the 3+ years I have had a DW account, I have had maybe two spam comments. Possibly as many as five -- my memory is notoriously fuzzy -- but certainly no more than that.

By way of comparison, I just got five spam LJ comments within the span of two hours this afternoon, all from different bot accounts, all with exactly the same text, on five completely random posts from the past few years. And this is far from an isolated incident. I get spam flurries like that at least every other month, and sometimes in a more sustained way -- three to five comments per day for several days running.

I am really glad that LJ flags and screens "suspicious" comments. Yes, that policy occasionally snares perfectly legitimate comments that just happen to contain a live link to an article or picture somebody wants to share, but mostly it snares phishing scams and skeezy, manipulative ads for dating sites or cookware sites or who the fuck even knows what the spammers are actually trying to sell. And it's pretty easy to unscreen the non-spam comments.

But it would be so very nice if the spammers couldn't even get accounts in the first place.

(And now off to the service auction. Modified excitment?)

Comments

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

We're all having problems with it. If one entry gets hit more than once, I just lock comments. It's all old entries, though my Yuletide letter just got hit today.

Ugh

[edenfalling]

Mine are "people" (and I use the term loosely) claiming to be my secret admirer and redirecting me to some online dating site. It's incredibly stupid. And I got a sixth one right after I made this post!

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

yep, me too. Delete, Ban, Report, repeat.

[edenfalling]

I got two more tonight, for a grand total of eight between 3pm and midnight on Saturday. The ONLY difference among them is the URL of the skeevy dating site -- it's always the same blahblahthingy-dot-com, but what comes between the http part and the blahblahthingy part keeps varying. *sigh* The eighth spam comment was on my most recent post, but the others have been on random posts going all the way back to 2005. Scattershot in the extreme.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

Solution! Go to your Journal Privacy settings and set a Captcha setting for all non-friend comments. That should stop it.

[edenfalling]

Great idea, thank you! I have changed my settings. :-)

[lady_songsmith]

I'm hearing this over and over from people, and I'm -- knock on wood -- fairly mystified, as I've gotten 1 spam comment in the past month, which is a bit high for me (it's usually 1 in 4 months), but hardly a deluge.

[edenfalling]

You are very lucky. May you continue to be so! (They are absolutely baffling in their choice of targets. I mean, you'd think maybe putting spam on my fanfic posts might make sense, since those could conceivably be linked to on other pages, but they seem to pick their target pages completely at random.)

[redwolf]

Gah! LJ really annoy me for doing sod all to prevent spam.

They rarely remove bot accounts. They don't kill accounts using the site as part of their spam loop. And the recent influx of spam comments is really obnoxious. I've had buckets of them. The majority are the eLiveBuy, Chinese knock-off scum, with a few variants and one idiot who created an account first (and it's still live).

Ended up locking comments off to LJ users only, but I like the suggestion of locking comments on older entries.

[edenfalling]

My six today have been for some really sleazy dating (and/or porn) site, via bots claiming to have crushes on me. The previous ones have been a real mixed bag -- some porn, some auction sites, and as I said, a rash of cookware ads, which completely baffles me because I am among the least cooking-oriented people alive. I keep deleting them as spam, banning the accounts, and reporting them as bots, but it's only ever a temporary palliative measure, never a true cure. *sigh*

I have a few older entries where I had to lock comments because they were getting up to three spam comments a day. This flurry has been more scattershot so far, but if any single entry gets hit multiple times, I will lock it down too. *deeper sigh*

[redwolf]

If you check the list of scum you have banned under your account you can see which ones have been removed. It's depressing how few that number is. LJ sucks when it comes to doing anything about abuse.

I've missed the porn bot, but my eLiveBuy scum was hammering older posts with a run of spam. I'd get a dozen hits all 15 minutes apart. Then six hours later they'd switch to a different post.

I don't understand the bot behaviour. Yeah, hitting an old post means you have more likelihood of not being removed, but it also means less traffic and hitting the same post repeatedly is a really poor return on investment. It makes your dodgy links look even more obviously dodgy for a start and it puts all your eggs in one basket when it would be a better tactic to spread the garbage around. Stupid spambot is poorly coded.

[edenfalling]

Of the eight who spammed me today, four have already been removed. Which is not what I would call a great average for such incredibly obvious spambots, but compared to the response to some of my previous spam flurries, it's a noticeable improvement. :-/

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

I've only gotten one, hilariously enough in my knitting journal -- which I haven't updated in at least five years -- on a post titled "sock fetish." That kind of cracks me up.

[edenfalling]

*dies laughing*