Spammers are some of the lowest life forms on Earth, right there with mosquitoes and leeches. They suck the life out of everything they touch, not caring about the people they hurt in the process. Their whole focus is their bottom line, and when they latch onto a new host, they quote the Godfather mantra, “It’s not personal; it’s business.”
I hate Spam in all flavors, but especially Comment Spam. Comment Spam doesn’t just hurt one person; it hurts all members involved. Sure, the webmaster has to deal with the trouble of deleting the Spam and blacklisting the Spammer, but also all members of that site’s community have to filter out which comment links they believe to be legit and which ones are phony. And beyond that, if the webmaster misses deleting one, that Spammer gets Google Juice. So now when you search for your favorite widget, a bunch of the search results will be nothing more than a load of crap. Comment Spam hurts everybody.
A few months back I started using a service on my site to help thwart E-Mail address harvesting. I don’t like E-Mail Spam, either. Project Honey Pot offers a means of leading E-Mail address harvesters (crapbots) to a bait page, and they usually take the bait. I haven’t had very many E-Mail Crapbots visit my page, though. So the results were only one or two Spam messages received at a time, and those were oftentimes weeks apart.
However, I do get loads of Comment Spam. Now, none of it ever sees the light of day, because I’m using Akismet and Spam Karma, along with various and sundry other anti-Spam plugins and devices. Those two always seem to do the trick before I even need the others, though. And this was working fine for me. The Spam never even gets seen, and all I have to do is go through and delete them out of my database about once a week. Everyone is happy.
But I’m a little lazy, and any polishing that can be done to the system to make my workload lighter is always welcome. And this is where I had my big idea. What if I changed the wording of the links a little bit to make it look intriguing to other Crapbots? What if I made one look like a “your link here” button on my links page, or another look like a “send comment” button near the comment form? I wonder if that would work?
Well, you’re reading this, and it did. In fact, it worked so flawlessly that I have not yet received one Comment Spam since the addition. And the numbers on the image only display E-Mail Spam. They don’t yet track Comment Spam. This was the easiest thing I’ve ever done in the war against Spam. It took me all of an hour to get it done, and it works beautifully. The best part about all of this is that you and I will never even see the honey pots.
You don’t have to worry about which links to avoid. You can’t even see them. And even if you happened to find one and clicked on it, all you’d see is a copy of my Terms of Use. But that’s probably not going to happen; they’re just too hard to locate. You would probably have to view my page source to find them, and even then you’d probably have a tough time recognizing them from legitimate text. And that’s why they work so well.
~Jonathan
Update
This article has since been deprecated. I left it so the search engines wouldn’t freak out. I’m not implementing this tactic anymore because it is frowned upon by various sources, including my host. Their words were, “It attracts the wrong crowd.” I didn’t realize the validity of their statement until I noticed the Java scrapers: [Redundant link removed; you can find the link to this article in the next list: “Protecting Your Content”. -Ed]
Burn this feed.
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