I received several blog comments overnight that included links to Chinese IP addresses. All of them were in perfect English. Some were complimentary, some were insulting.
While they were quite comprehensive, none of them had anything to do with the content of the blog post.
Therefore all of them were spam. I also suspect that the links included point to sites which, if visited, would do things to your computer that you’d rather not have happen.
These comments are making it past my Akismet filters (although they will be reported to Akismet) and I have my blogs set up as follows:
* No registration required, but you must have at least one approved comment before your comments will be automatically approved (in other words, all of your comments will be held for moderation until I approve at least one).
* I receive email notification (to my main account) of any comments awaiting approval, as well as any approved / pre-approved comments.
I strongly recommend that you configure your blogs to do the same. I did have “registration required” and “moderate all comments” at one point, but that tends to cut down on the number of comments you receive.
Each email you receive (if you follow this system) will show you the IP address and domain name that the link points to. In this case, the “.cn” at the end of each link set off alarm bells. When I saw how good the English was and how off-base the rather verbose comments were, my suspicions were aroused even more.
They are spam. They could point to malicious websites.
While I’m not in a position to tell you how to manage your blog, please keep this in mind: Any link on your website is a link that one of your website visitors could click on. Do you want to send them to sites that could trash their computer? I say that it’s in your best interests to help protect your customers’ computers by providing as safe a site as possible.
So please; consider saying “no” to these links and report them to Akismet as spam.
Thanks,
Tom
P.S. — While all of the comments thus far have pointed to Chinese IP addresses, I suspect that I’ll soon start seeing such comments pointing to IP addresses from other countries. It’s not JUST a “Chinese Thing”…!
Post a Comment