Keep Spam in the Can

I have an awesome new spam plug in.  It’s called WP-SpamShield and this plug in really works.  I mean really.  It’s basically cut my spam down from 185 pieces per day to nothing. NOTHING.  No spam, nada, zip, zilch, squawdouche.  

I’ve been loving it, but I’ve also had some readers complain they got a “This appears to be spam” message when they’ve tried to leave a legitimate comment.  Most of you have tried again and been able to successfully leave a comment.  This past weekend though I had a reader contact me to let me know she couldn’t leave a comment.  At all.

The great thing about these little plug ins, is there is typically a place you can go if you are having problems.  So I did.  I checked the FAQ’s page on their website, skimmed through and determined that none of it pertained to the issue I was having, so I sent an e-mail.  In the response e-mail, I was directed to the specific question that pertained to my issue and it laid out exactly the steps I needed to get the issue resolved. I downloaded the plug ins, asked the reader to comment again and dutifully sent the required record off to be analyzed.  Turns out the reader was posting a legitimate spam comment.

WHAAAAT?

Yes, it’s true.  I’m going to share something here that many of you may not know and this comes directly from the president of the company that makes the plug in.

In the name portion of the comment section the reader wrote, Jodi@heartlikeadog.com (the name has been changed to protect the innocent) the culprit in this whole thing was, are you ready?  The @ symbol.  When the reader removed the @ symbol her comment went through.  Yay!!  Problem solved. 

But here’s the part I wanted to share with you and this is in Scott’s own words, ” Any time people write something in a “Name” field on a comment form or contact form that is NOT their name (ie keywords, business, name, name of their blog), this is the very definition of spam.   (If a blog uses CommentLuv, this rule does not apply….people can spam away in the name field…to an extent.) The plugin checks for quite a number of spam indicators, not just the message content, and this is one of the tests. When people have their comment blocked, they are informed that their comment seems spammy, and they can try it again, but they need to remove the spammy element from the comment submission (including name, website, comment text, etc). This plugin does not have false positives because of the type of system it uses…it gives the user a chance to try again. If someone could not post a comment, no matter what they did, that would be a false positive, and is the very problem many other spam plugins have.

Just an FYI, and you may want to let your friend know…The whole “@ Blog Name” started with the CommentLuv plugin a long time ago…sites using it would say specifically for users to add “@ Their Blog Name” in the name portion and would make all the links “follow” in order to give SEO benefit to the commenters. (I don’t know your familiarity with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but basically this means it would help the commenter’s site rank a little better in Google.) On sites not using CommentLuv (and therefore not saying to add “@ Your Blog Name”) it’s not generally acceptable for people to do, although some people started doing it on every blog they commented on, because they didn’t really understand the reasons for it. It’s actually not that common anymore…professional bloggers don’t use @ when they post comments…they just use their name because its less spammy. If you’re not using CommentLuv the comment links are “nofollow” (the default), so no SEO link love is passed to their site, and there is no benefit for users to add the “@ Blog Name” part, and it’s best for them to just remove it. I know there may be some niches where people may do this from time to time but in the bigger scope of blogging worldwide it’s definitely being phased out. 

Interesting huh?  I know that different platforms and different themes put the name, e-mail addy and blog address in different positions.  My thought is if at first you get a “this sounds like spam” message, check to make sure you aren’t switching your name and e-mail address.  *something I totally would do. 🙂

ROUND ROBIN

The Round Robin has a name!!  It’s called “Caring for Critters” and it kicks off September 1st!  As of right now I have a total of about 32 participating bloggers. 

 

 

You may have noticed a new page has appeared on the blog called, Community Corner.  On that page I will post links to all posts for the Round Robin, if you are interested in adding your voice to this great topic, please let me know either in the comments or by sending me an e-mail.  I will make sure to add you to the schedule and get you all the pertinent information!

Welcome to Thursday’s Barks and Bytes Blog hop hosted by 2 Brown Dogs and Heart Like a Dog.

The Barks and Bytes hop is for anything at all and all bloggers are welcome. You don’t have to be a dog blog to join.

For new blog hoppers, a blog hop is list of links that is shared on multiple blogs. In order to be fair to all participants we ask you to please use the linky list. If your blog does not support a linky list, please link back to your hosts.

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