“Easy to find helpful information. The Author, you – super hero! All the best! – http://viagra-gl-pills.com/buy-viagra.html.

Everyday my blog receives, on average, 6.5 comments like this. Most of them are quite amusing in some ways.

Blog spam is carried out by spam bots which randomly post comment or promote commercial services to blogs. According to the live zeitgeist published by Akismet, 90% of all blog comments are spams.

A few days ago I received this comment sent by “Amy S Quinn” via the contact form on my blog,

Hi Eddie,

We just posted an article ” 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site ” (<posted with a URL>). I thought I’d bring it to your attention just in case you think your readers would find it interesting.

Either way, thanks for your time!

Amy S Quinn

It looked to me like Amy’s comment was just a normal heads-up from a fellow reader. But then when I googled “Amy S. Quinn,” I found that Amy was quite busy posting comments about many things such as Wal-Mart’s in-store clinics, top 20 sexual-harassment cases of all time, top 80 charities for open source and open access advocates, and top 50 vegan and vegetarian restaurants in the world, etc. I am sure the list will keep going.

And then in a blog post, “Who in the world is Amy S. Quinn?” many people comment and believe that Amy is a bot. But in my case, I got the message from Amy S. Quinn which was sent to me via the contact form. The message was addressed to my name, “Eddie.” Besides, my contact form has a sender validation feature. So how could it be possible to program a bot to hack my name and answer my random validation question? Only if Amy the bot can think, when it spams…

Just when we think hacking the random validation question is difficult, I read a piece on Websense Threat blog that the Captcha of Windows Live Mail has been compromised. I also knew Yahoo! and Gmail’s captcha were hacked as well. Take a look at PWNtcha, a site to demonstrate the inefficiency of many captcha implementations. They have a lot of defeated captcha samples and show you each of its weakness.

Frankly, I don’t have a solution to stop spam bots from sending me comments. May be Amy the bot has a suggestion in her next comment for me. Till then, I guess the most effective way is to moderate all the comments before publishing each of them.

Popularity: 22% [?]

 Subscribe my feed