Current Mood: Erm…

By the spambots.

Oh, goodie! Now I can watch my Akismet thingie count how many have been automatically sent to the bit bucket! (/semi-sarcasm)

You may recall that a while ago, I was curious to see whether spambots were noticing that Akismet was running and stopping bothering.

Well…Today I cracked 1,000 spams blocked at Blog #3, so obviously it wasn’t the little widget showing which was responsible for the initial slowdown in spammage.

After thinking about it for a while, I started staring at the log files and realized what had really been going on:

When I redid that site, I deleted all the old posts. Other sites that I changed also had their formats changed. So, what had been happening is that the spammers, who hadn’t updated their comment cannons, were getting nothing but 404s. Others tried to make some kind of quick-n-dirty workaround, by the looks of it (or they misconfigured their software from the start)–also getting them 404s. So, I got less spam!

Last night, someone figured out that the URLs had changed. I just logged in to find 207 more spams. But, while the spammer managed to spot 404s after a whole month of getting them (maybe the software clued him in)–he didn’t have the sense to take a look at the site and realize that ALL of it (except for 2 spams) was blocked from showing by Akismet! So, he wasted his coding efforts on getting spams into…NOWHERESVILLE! They’re held in the spam queue (invisible to the public) in case I want to check for any nonspam, and then to get fully rid of them I just click the button.

Haw haw.

It was wishful thinking on my part that spamware would get good enough to know when not to bother. But, Akismet itself is a GREAT plugin which automatically blocks the junk from ever showing up. So, Blog #3 itself remains beautifully spam-free as I “celebrate” over 1000 spams easily deleted.

Current Mood: Happy

After seeing a few days’ worth of data, I’d say I’ve gotten enough results to have some surety that, for a blog already well-known to spammers, showing the widget for “spam caught by Akismet” does affect the level of incoming spams, but doesn’t stop it entirely.

No new spams have come to this blog or my deals blog. But my other blog, the “Blog #3,” continues to get spammed. Spams attempting to manifest there, however, have stayed down 60% since before I put the widget on the front page.

So it seems that at least some spammers/spambots are able to “see” it.

Even though there’s still some that don’t, Akismet is doing a great job at blocking the spam. It’s very satisfying to be able to hit that Delete button and flush ‘em all at one go, without nuking the real messages at the same time!

Current Mood: Cool

It’s been about a day since I last cleared the spams on Blog #3, and I can now say that the volume has dropped about 60%. It went from 101 the other day, to just 41 total for today.

So I think that at least some spambots know not to bother when that “spam blocked” widget is showing. Of course, if the amount spikes back up, I’ll know it was just a fluke.

On another topic,
I got an uber sale today!
Gotta love B2B

Retail sales are more frequent, but when a nice big corporate order comes in, it really makes for a nice day. And makes me sooo glad I went for the merchant side. Now I’m motivated to put up Merchant Site #3. And 4, and 5… LOL I don’t collect mere domains, I end up with collections of sites!

But really, who needs to settle for affiliate commissions when you can have the whole apple?

Current Mood: Meh

As explained in the previous post, I noticed a halting of spam after putting up the visible Akismet counter on 2 of 3 blogs, and was testing the third.

For the first day, spams continued to pour into Blog #3 like a waterfall (only to be blocked by Akismet). I woke up yesterday to 101 new spams there waiting for me to hit “delete” on.

But today, I woke up to 14 spams. Quite a substantial dropoff! Now, a lot of spammers run their bots at night, and it’s also possible that it’s a normal dip in activity. But it’s an encouraging development.

On the other hand, I came across the blog of the guy who founded Wordpress: www.photomatt.net. And his Akismet blocker label shows it’s blocked 1,242,000 spams on his blog alone!

So I guess some spammers are persistant no matter what…

Current Mood: Surprised

Until yesterday or the day before, this blog had been getting loads of spam comments and trackbacks.

Then, I set it up so that the Akismet stats would show in the top left. Since then, NO SPAMS at all!!

On another blog I run, I just reactivated and redesigned, I’ve noticed the same thing. No spams after I put the widget up, even though it’s not nearly so prominent (it’s near the bottom right). Prior to that, I was literally getting about 100/day! Now it’s only showing 2, and those 2 were actually post-attempted before I put the widget on.

My 3rd blog, though, doesn’t have the widget. I’ve got Akismet running, but it’d be a slight pain to change the layout, so I haven’t gotten around to displaying that stat. And it’s barraged with spam attempts!

Perhaps the spambots are programmed to not bother with blogs that are showing that widget?

I’ll soon find out. Today or tomorrow, I’m going to go ahead and get that widget showing on Blog #3. I’ll soon see if the spams stop coming. One time could be a fluke, two a longshot, but 3 times I would consider a pretty certain correlation.

Current Mood: Happy

Here’s the new theme! Hope everyone likes it. Everyone but the spammers, that is!

What does that have to do with the theme? Well, the new look also has the latest WordPress backend on it. Complete with Akismet.

Akismet is an automatic blogspam-killing plugin included in new WordPress packages, which makes short work out of spam elimination! In fact, if I just let it clear the spam quarantine on its own, it makes NO work out of it!

So, I’ll be turning comments on for most posts after this one. This may or may not affect old posts, but new ones should be commentable. I won’t allow comments for the Sponsored posts, regardless. I know I sure wouldn’t want to sponsor a post and then have the ad wrecked by people deciding to mention the competition, LOL…

I’ll still moderate comments, so don’t be worried if you make one and it doesn’t insta-appear.

On other matters, there are still some tweaks to be made to the new look. The text is a bit too small, I don’t like the font…little things like that. And I just noticed there’s some stupid PHP error in the footer that I’ll have to fix.

On the good side, I get a few capabilities I’ve always wanted. You’ll see that this post has a “mood” icon. I’ve always thought those were cool, since with an icon, I can make a note of it, even though I rarely want to make an entire post dedicated to my mood. And, I have the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, too, so somewhere a tag cloud should appear. It seems to take about 20 posts or so before a tag cloud really shows its strength of being able to point out what subjects are the most common/popular, so have patience…Also, I’m not sure how the coloration’s going to come out since I set it for the most popular being maroon-linked, and the least ones in gray (I’m hoping for a gray-red middle level, but who knows?).

Now to hit Publish and see what comes of this!