All bloggers detest spam and splogs. Spammers attempt to co-op your website into advertising for them while stealing your bandwidth, and splogs cut right to the chase by stealing your words and reposting them with their own ads. We’ve got plugins like Akismet, Spam-Karma that stop comment spam while other plugins like AntiLeech and Digital Fingerprint help you fight the rebologging splogs.

All these plugins are great at helping to defend your website from the nefarious types, but the greatest tools in the fight against splogs and spam are elbow grease and a discerning mind.

One thing I know most webmasters (including myself) don’t do enough of is sift through our weblogs. Website logs collected at the server level can tell us a myriad of things but most importantly, they can help us pinpoint who is stealing our bandwidth (via out of control robots and comment spammers) and who is stealing our content. A tiny bit of hard work, the ability to follow directions, some familiarity with excel, and a keen eye for the out of place is all you need to figure out who is stealing from you by looking at your logs. Let me show you. » Read the rest of the entry..

Introduction: Part 1 of a 2 part series focused on how Akismet can / could be taught good or evil. Part 1 below explains the situation I found myself in, and the steps that I took to remove myself from Akismet’s list of comment spammers. Part 2 introduces some theoretical concepts for the creation of spamming networks.

For the past couple of days, Akismet (a popular comment spam fighting service provided by Automattic et al) had me pegged as a comment spammer. I didn’t know that Akismet was doing this, I only figured it out after several random blogs refused to post comments I had made.
» Read the rest of the entry..