Scott Beale / Laughing Squid” with credit to laughingsquid.com.

In the last 7 days I have received more than 6,000 comments that I have manually reviewed and approved or deleted. It turned out that the comments were not individually written by visiting humans. I was being hit by non-human spammers attacking my website blog comment sections in a massive assault. So my methods in dealing with comments has now changed.

Revision for 6-20-2013 with changes to the earlier post. See below reasons for the new actions.

In less than a week I encountered a spike in comments, which I took as real people at first. Then the resulting influx of hundreds per hour did not match with the views showed in the analysis for people viewing my site. I had no idea how or why this would be happening.

My computer partner finally explained yesterday via e-mail that I am the victim of my hard won success, spammers had found me due to my high ranking efforts on some search engines for multiple posts. That success is good, but it drew undesirables who wanted to bury me in spam.

As a result I have resorted to mass deletions of comments until he and I can decide on some electronic counter measures when my computer partner and I can get together. I can delete these faster than they can come in so they will from here on not be approved.

My expertise with this blog is in CONTENT, not electronic countermeasures for spam.

Please forgive my learning curve, humans who read this post! The non-human comments I suffered through will for the time being remain as a reminder that I went through one entire week and nearly 6,000 spams before I started to address the issue effectively! What a lousy experience for a new writer/blogger/owner.

For the writer/owner of a blog no value is gained by this electronic spam assault on the business.

It cost me a lot of time from my researching and from writing to sort the real human comments from the spam, a great many hours of lost effort and time to be honest. The spammers must have gained something due to increasing intensity of their attacks as I attempted to deal with the mess but I have no idea what that gain is and I no longer care to be honest.

My apologies for not recognizing this spam attack earlier and shutting it down sooner. Real comments and suggestions will be sorted and approved from here on.

If you feel that the 30 odd word-for-word spam comments that are recycled are what you should use in the future to communicate with me and you are a human, I won’t know the difference and it will not be approved.

Write a real comment and I will almost certainly approve you, pending decency of course. 

Please comment on the content of that post, or how you see the merits of the content. If you do that, you will be seen by me and I will deal with it accordingly.

Impolite and rude comments are more than likely to be deleted. Profanity such as what resulted yesterday immediately after I changed to mass deletions will not even be considered. I don’t even know how they knew I had started the mass deletions. These people are very harsh in their treatment of new bloggers.

I apparently made tons of non-human somethings very angry when I stopped their attacks based on the profane responses from their hundreds of comments! These were deleted without a second thought and will continue to be deleted from now on.

Welcome humans to EVRA and please share any post you find worthy with the social media of your choice.

Humans welcome, all others please move on and let me try and put my message of empowering volunteers for the world to see and hear.

Share on Tumblr