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BlogHarbor plans for spammers?
 
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tigersi



Joined: 20 Apr 2005
Posts: 174

PostPosted: Fri Sep 09, 2005 10:28 am    Post subject: BlogHarbor plans for spammers? Reply with quote

John,

As you probably gaged from my posts today, I'm frustrated. The reason is because I just visited my BlogHarbor stats and discovered as the daily recurring case the preponderance of my referrers are flipping spammers. Today I blocked 17 spammers from my site. This is one of my daily admin tasks.

That doesn't count the trackback spammers of which I now seem to have about 5 or more a day coming in.

This is so tiresome -- both in terms of time and in losing some of my bandwidth to these idiots.

In anticipation of your comment that BlogHarbor blocks these folks, that may be true but the process is leaky because some of these idiots show up for several days until I've blocked them myself.

I've mentioned BlogHarbor is taking steps to deal with the spammer referrals and trackbacks. Please share specific details of what these planned steps are and when users can expect them to be in place. In my ideal view, I'd like to be able to prevent these idiots from coming in at all, rather than having to deal with them after-the-fact.

These bloody spammers are a prime reason why BlogHarbor's stats are of little or no value to me. What good is finding out my blog received 1,717 requests yesterday when only 658 of them were legit visitors. The rest are junk.
_________________
Thanks!
Kathy (aka, Roaring Tiger)
http://bigcatchronicles.blogharbor.com
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JC



Joined: 19 Nov 2004
Posts: 29

PostPosted: Fri Sep 09, 2005 5:23 pm    Post subject: Spammers and numbers Reply with quote

To tag on what tiger is saying, I've noticed a doubling of traffic in the last month - but from what I can tell, the only increase I am seeing is in spammers.

If half (or over half) of my traffic is spammers, when I meet my monthly total, is my bandwidth simply being eaten up by spammers? What would be suggest for me to minimize this?
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Fri Sep 09, 2005 10:42 pm    Post subject: Re: BlogHarbor plans for spammers? Reply with quote

In anticipation of your comment that BlogHarbor blocks these folks, that may be true but the process is leaky because some of these idiots show up for several days until I've blocked them myself.

First, neither our service nor any other service can ever prevent spammers from sending their spam, nor will we evber be able to 100% reliably detect spam from ham (that's what non-spam is referred to). Email has been around a lot longer than blogs, and no one has yet to find a way to entirely prevent spam from getting to your inbox. It is simply unrealistic to think that would even be possible.

The best we can hope to do is to prevent as much as we can from getting to your blog in the first place, and from there allow you to determine if something is spam and block it from coming in the future. And that is what we are trying to do for you.

We already block a great deal of spam before it reaches you. We use a few different ways to determine if something is spam before it gets to you and are currently developing additional alogorithms and techniques to prevent spam from ever getting to your blog. It is unlikely however we will ever post in this forum or anywhere else what those algorithms or techniques are, as it would be extremely foolish for us for obvious reasons to let the spammers know what attributes we are examining to determine if a given referer/comment/trackback is spam...

We sympathize with your frustration, and assure you that we continue to devote resources to this issue. It is not in our best interest for various reasons to not to work to minimize spam, your satisfaction as a user being the primary reason.


Last edited by john on Sat Oct 22, 2005 8:39 pm; edited 1 time in total
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Fri Sep 09, 2005 10:58 pm    Post subject: Re: Spammers and numbers Reply with quote

JC wrote:
To tag on what tiger is saying, I've noticed a doubling of traffic in the last month - but from what I can tell, the only increase I am seeing is in spammers.

If half (or over half) of my traffic is spammers, when I meet my monthly total, is my bandwidth simply being eaten up by spammers? What would be suggest for me to minimize this?


My first question would be, what makes you think that the increase is due exclusively to spammers?

It's extremely unlikely that your bandwidth is "simply being eaten up by spammers." Without knowing your blog address though, we can't state anything specifically about your case. If you'd like us to take a look, then just let us know what your blog address is.

If your blog address is not anonymous, then adding the URL to your profile would make it easy for us to check every time.
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tigersi



Joined: 20 Apr 2005
Posts: 174

PostPosted: Sat Sep 10, 2005 12:14 am    Post subject: the ogre apologizes Reply with quote

John,

My inner ogre came out today. Please accept my apologies for taking out my spamming frustrations on you. You're right, spammers have been around for a while and they are tricky bastards to stamp down at any time.

My referral spam is up and the easy answer is to blame BlogHarbor. The alternative, and probably more realistic one though, is that the rise is a backhanded indication of my blog's success. As my readership -- of real readers! -- grows, so do my spam numbers.

Keep up valient efforts to keep the bastards at bay!
_________________
Thanks!
Kathy (aka, Roaring Tiger)
http://bigcatchronicles.blogharbor.com
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sat Sep 10, 2005 11:40 am    Post subject: Re: the ogre apologizes Reply with quote

Please accept my apologies for taking out my spamming frustrations on you.

Don't worry about it, it's frustrating to us as well. We're continuing to work on this problem for you and all of our users.
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JC



Joined: 19 Nov 2004
Posts: 29

PostPosted: Sat Sep 10, 2005 3:23 pm    Post subject: Added to profile Reply with quote

Okay, I've added this to the profile. Sorry about that - and yes, I hear the gentle sarcasm in your remark, but that's okay, I deserved it in this case, so my apologies again.

At any rate, through August 28th, I was doing around 50 MB a day - with a lot of 20-30 MB's, and then occasionally over 50 MB, with one day being 70 MB. Suddenly on August 29th and since then, every day was about 90 MB. This may simply be because I'm getting more "popular" - and I do see that my unique visitors have increased from 400-450, to 500-550.

But the bandwidth increase as a percentage is far over the unique visitors as a percentage, so I'm wondering why.

And then again, wondering if there can be a greater breakout of the xml figures (who, where, when served).

Thanks for your timely responses - they are appreciated.
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sat Sep 10, 2005 9:27 pm    Post subject: Re: Added to profile Reply with quote

yes, I hear the gentle sarcasm in your remark

Actually, none was intended. My sarcasm is usually far from gentle. Wink

This may simply be because I'm getting more "popular"

Looking at your stats and your blog, I would say yes, it seems your site is more popular than it once was. You have visitors who post comments, send trackbacks....

But the bandwidth increase as a percentage is far over the unique visitors as a percentage, so I'm wondering why.

Over time, if you blog regularly, that will always be the case. Think search engines and aggregators.

As search engines visit your site regularly, and find more pages this month than last month, the one unique visitor (the search engine indexer) will access more pages on this visit than the last.

The other major reason is RSS aggregators. You seem to have a lot of readers through the Newsgator Online service, a web-based RSS reader. Look at your Browser Summary stats to see this.

On August 28 you had 675 requests from the NewsGator service. On August 29, accesses by the same service nearly doubled to 1215 requests. That's 540 more accesses from just one "visitor".

So as users of web-based RSS aggregators like Bloglines, MyYahoo, and Newsgator Online increase, and those users interact with your blog via those services instead of visiting your site directly, you and all blog users will see your bandwidth increase at a faster rate than the number of visitors.

And then again, wondering if there can be a greater breakout of the xml figures (who, where, when served).

We understand that there is a desire for more granularity with respect to all aspects of the site stats.
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