Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

  • About
    • About Will
    • Contact Will
    • BIG Questions Institute
  • Blog
  • Speaking
  • Coaching
  • News
  • Books

Spam Woes

October 25, 2004 By Will Richardson

Well, nothing save shutting this site down for a period has been able to stop the spammers from getting through…about 50 comments a day that I’ve been trying to stay ahead of. Not fun. For Manila users out there, I’ve tried closing the site to membership, shutting off comments, even blocking and deleting the offending “members” but as I said, nothing has worked. And I see I’m not the only one out there having this issue.

It’s not especially hard to delete the messages in Manila although it would be easier to have a check box of all messages that I could just run through and select. And I’m not going to shut down the site because of spam…yet. Since turning comments off doesn’t help, I’ll turn them back on. What the heck.

The problem, obviously, is what this might portend for my student sites, and that has me really worried. I mean, I have a feeling those sites probably aren’t on the spammers’ radar, but I shudder to think of the implications if I can’t find some way to shut them out other than shutting sites down. That would not be fun.

Filed Under: General, On My Mind

Comments

  1. Kieran Shaw says

    October 25, 2004 at 5:47 am

    Bad luck Will. Even in the relatively closed community of Warwick Blogs we have had our share of problems with comments, even spam from our own students on each others blogs. I don’t know if we can ever stop this kind of thing. I guess the disadvantage of using Manila or even our own blog system is that if someone really wants to spam you, it is harder to counter because there are not the wealth of anti-spam plugins that there are for MT.

  2. Chris Lehmann says

    October 25, 2004 at 9:52 am

    If it makes you feel any better, we’ve been getting clobbered at Beacon with spam… to the tune of 100s a day. Even with MT-blacklist, it’s taking significant chunks of my day to keep the Beacon blogs spam-free.

  3. Randy Brown says

    October 25, 2004 at 3:10 pm

    WordPress and Serendipity have great anti-spam features built-in. I use WP and have absolutely no spam gettign through to the site. I have turned on comment moderation – receive an email when a comment is made. It contains a convenient link which I use to either auto-approve or -delete the comment.

  4. Randy Brown says

    October 25, 2004 at 3:12 pm

    Of course, there’s other features built in which simply auto-delete comments using keywords, IPs, etc. Fully configurable.

  5. Susan Brooks-Young says

    October 25, 2004 at 4:52 pm

    Okay, Will…I’m a neophyte to all this, but trying to convince school administrators that blogs are useful tools for them, for their teachers, and for they’re students. I do have a blog through Tripod and haven’t had any problems with spam (yet). I’m not sure I have a clear picture of what’s happening here- people are sending spam to this blog that is being posted as comments that you then need to delete? This is probably a dumb question, but I would like to understand what’s happening.

Recent Posts

  • “Never”
  • My 2023 “Tech Cleanse” Has Begun
  • Five Themes for Educators in 2023
  • Schools in a Time of Chaos
  • Has This Crisis Really Changed Schools?

Search My Blog

Archived Posts

Copyright © 2023 Will Richardson · All Rights Reserved

Follow me on Twitter @willrich45