14 Oct 2009, 10:23 a.m.

Manual Comment Spam

Some time last year I installed a CAPTCHA tool on this site, in an attempt to mitigate the deluge of spam comments that I was receiving.

It has actually been very successful: despite some fairly concerted attempts, since that date, I don't think any automated spam has got through.

What I am seeing, however, is a steady increase in the amount of manual spam. By this I mean actual human people coming to the site and entering inane comments promoting various seedy businesses. I guess hiring kids or the unemployed to do this is no more expensive than hiring people to hand out flyers in the street - and you see plenty of that.

So I'd be interested to hear if other bloggers are seeing this, and how they tend to deal with it.

In the meantime, if you are among this type of spammer, I'll politely ask you to move along elsewhere: I'll only delete your comment and block your IP, and it'll become quite tiresome for all of us. william@geeksltd.co.uk, that includes you, though I suspect that's a made up address.

Normal service will now be resumed, and I promise that my next post will contain some real content! None
Posted by Simon at 01:53:00 PM