LJ Spam Response

[azurelunatic]

http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_biz/219332.html

Additionally, if you get spammed by a user, do report them to Abuse or Support, if nothing else. I got spammed this morning, reported them to Abuse, and less than two minutes later, the account was suspended.

The account in question had been created last night, had no posts, and had distributed over 3,000 comments. The ones I got were identical links to a porn site. I am guessing that the other comments posted by the spammer were the same or similar.

Next, I suppose, the spammers are going to start putting journal entries in the spam journals to make it look as if there is actual human presence. *sigh* Argh.

Comments

[wibbble]

I think the most important thing people can do to stop spam is to not, under any circumstances, follow the links. If you work with people and they follow the links, hit them until they promise to never do it again.

If no one went to spammed sites, spamming would stop being worthwhile. Most of the spammers are in countries where it's hard to track them down. Most of the idiots clicking links are in North America and Europe. We can find /them/! (And then hit them in the head and take their computers away.)

Sadly, you cannot beat up a googlebot

[yduras.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem, though, is that they're trying to improve their Google pagerank - which is based on how many links the little spidering robots find.

Re: Sadly, you cannot beat up a googlebot

[wibbble]

Ahh. I hadn't thought of that.

That would only apply to LJ-type spamming, though, and not normal email spamming (which was what I was thinking of, really).

There's been some calls for Google to stop counting blogs when it comes to the rankings. After reading about 'Googlebombing', I can kind of see why.

Re: Sadly, you cannot beat up a googlebot

[azurelunatic]

And it looks like they were hitting heavily indexed pages, or something. 'Cause I'm one of the top Googlebotted Livejournals.

Re: Sadly, you cannot beat up a googlebot

[azurelunatic]

It's nice to be able to Google myself when I'm searching for something in my back entries. But Google should probably refine their "how to weight this" algorithms based on whether it's a blog or not, the general accuracy of links from that blog, the number of links from the blog, whether or not it's another blog that's being linked to...

Agh. I could get stuck there all day, thinking of factors.

Re: Sadly, you cannot beat up a googlebot

[azurelunatic]

I'm so happy they're coming out with the "disable auto-links/links in anonymous comments" thinger.

Re: Sadly, you cannot beat up a googlebot

[wibbble]

There's also 'rel="nofollow"' which LJ are supposed to be supporting - links like that Google won't follow. Several blogging systems are going to put it on all links from comments/trackbacks, and thus defeat the point of the spam.

Re: Sadly, you cannot beat up a googlebot

[azurelunatic]

Nice.

(I'm re-reading the old stuff, so I'm going back through and putting current commentary in.)