Livejournal, Dreamwidth, and spam
Nov. 10th, 2012 05:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingOne 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?)
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?)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-11 06:57 am (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-11-11 07:14 am (UTC)