wherein Liz talks about LJ spam comments

[edenfalling]

I keep my master fic directory post at the top of my journal not by making it sticky but by dating it twenty years into the future. This is partly because I started doing that before sticky posts were a thing, but I keep up the habit because it has a very useful side effect:

It catches spam comments.

See, LJ spammers tend to attack the most recent post on a journal, regardless of its content. And since the 'most recent' post on my journal is always my fic directory, it catches all that spam in a single place where I can deal with it conveniently, instead of having it spread over dozens of posts.

I mention this because I got a notification of a spam comment a couple days ago, and when I went to delete it, I realized that LJ had (for unknown reasons) NOT been notifying me about spam comments for several months... and I had accumulated 118 other spam comments since October. *headdesk* I mean, they were all screened and therefore invisible to anyone but me, but still. When you don't delete a spam comment, the spambot that left it thinks you're a viable target and just keeps pinging you every few days, which is how I built up such a pile of bullshit on that post.

About 110 of them were for porn sites, and predictably gross ones at that. The remaining few included one makeup ad, one online medication ad, one 'make a living filling out online surveys; this is totally not a scam, we swear!' ad, and about five things in Cyrillic which I couldn't read but were, statistically speaking, probably also porn. *sigh*

I cleared them all out, and will be keeping a closer eye on that post going forward since LJ is demonstrably falling down on sending me spam comment notices.

Comments

[redwolf]

LJ does sod all to remove the spam accounts that post spam rather than just comment.

[edenfalling]

All these comments were left anonymously rather than by named accounts, but yeah, LJ apparently gave up entirely on deleting spam accounts several years ago.

(DW is MUCH better about that. I have only been followed by two fishy accounts during nearly seven years here, and each of them was promptly removed once I reported them.)

[isis]

I had the same experience - got a notification the other day, went to clear it out, and found 211 (screened) spam comments on that entry!

In my experience, the most recent entry doesn't get a thing (though actually, the most recent entries don't allow comments, because I turned off commenting on new posts some years ago and direct everything to Dreamwidth). The entry that got all the spam was...a fic announcement (pointing to my post in a community) from 2004! No idea why that particular entry was targeted, though I do recall having to clear spam from it in the past. I cleared out the spam and froze that entry to new comments. But if LJ hasn't been notifying about comments lately, there might possibly be other entries that were hit.

[edenfalling]

211? Yikes!

I have had a few other posts that inexplicably gathered spam -- IIRC, one fic post from 2006 or so, and a completely random post complaining about my everyday life circa 2008 -- but those only got five or six comments each, and that was years ago. For whatever reason, my directory post successfully catches about 99% of attempted spam. *shrug*

In summary, the internet is weird.

[heliopausa]

I did that, post-dating a fiction round-up post (possibly got the idea from you!) but only dated it to next month - this was some years ago, of course.

Now the date is coming up, and I can't change it. At least, when I try, I get the message "Client error: Sorry, there is a problem with content of your entry: spam patterns were detected. Please contact Abuse Prevention team if you consider this is a mistake.: http:// is banned for spam. Exclude it to post entry". I am quite flummoxed, and think I'll have to delete it and start again. :(

[edenfalling]

Oh! That's probably because it's an older entry and is using http instead of https (unsecured vs. secured). I do not know nearly enough about computers to tell you how to work around that.

That is almost certainly a DW issue rather than an LJ issue, since I think LJ (since moving to Russia) has discontinued https service and serves everything over plain unsecured http URLs. I suggest reporting a bug/opening a support request, because the whole point of support staff is to know how to fix stuff users can't fix on our own. :)

[heliopausa]

Thank you! It is an old post, though I update it periodically, so your analysis is probably spot-on; I'll take the tip, and hope to profit from your wisdom! :)