by Zima

If you want these ridiculous things, you deserve all the spam you get.

Being a SkaDate Dating Software blogger I have to deal with influx of spam in my comments on the daily basis. Most of the time I hit flag or delete buttons the moment I see some obscure vendor trying to sell me luxurious enlargement pills or online viagra knock-offs. You can see that I don’t really pay attention to that stuff.

However, lately I’ve seen lots of shoes offers from a certain respectable company, and it looks like there’s no escaping their constant bombardment of blog comments section anymore. Oh, and I also know that many admins running dating sites powered by SkaDate dating script suffer the same fate. We all love designer shoes, sure, but this latest spam attack has seriously went overboard.

You can shake the proverbial fists at the sky all you want, and even condemn shoe wearing altogether, but that won’t change the pressing matter at hand – how to shield your blog or website against the hurricane of annoying spam. As usual, I’m ready to help you with some basic but ultimately useful tips.

First of all, it is vital to understand that most of the time spam comments are generated by special bots, so there is no value in arguing with message originators. Spam posts are also easily recognized, as they usually follow one another in quick succession, have little relevance to the discussion or even the entire board, and often include a link back to their own sites. The latter helps spammers increase their search engine rankings.

So if you are running a third-party blog, you can  disallow multiple comment submission. Of course by doing this you run the risk of blocking actually relevant comments. There’s also the off chance spam comments are made through some proxy software, so your own protection will not recognize the submitter having the same source.

A better solution might be to ban links in the comments section altogether. Since the goal of spammers is typically to drive traffic back to their shoe-making planets (or wherever they live), a blog that does not allow links in the comments will be useless for them. Unfortunately this can irritate some users and will still not protect you from gibberish spam posts sometimes sent to test websites’ spam filters.

But if you are a lucky owner of SkaDate solution, you have even better tools at your disposal.  For instance, it might be a good idea to introduce a validation system, which will verify that the comment is made by an actual person instead of a spam bot. Use email verification for all new comments, and enable captchas in the admin area – this very useful tool  has come a long way since it first appeared as an anti-spam solution.

Finally, never neglect the power of spam-filtering. Rather than engaging in hand-to-shoe battles on your own, just observe conversation patterns on your blog and then strike the most common spam words through the spam-filter. I can even give you some of the most often used words appearing on spammed SkaDate blogs:

• Jewelry;
• Tiffany Jewelry;
• Tiffany & Co jewelry;
• Coach bags;
• Uggs;
• Marck Spencer;
• etc., you get the idea.

But if you have already reached the spam-tolerance threshold, apply all of the above and your blog will became an impenetrable fortress no producer of shoes, medicine, jewelry, etc., will dare to attack. Good luck to you and let’s hope our combined efforts will eventually put all spam worries to rest.