Blog Spam

[Karen S. Garvin]

Hi all,

I have a wordpress.com blog that I've had up and running for several months. I'm noticing that after I make a post on this forum, the anti-spam software Askimet catches a lot of spam.

1) Is a spam bot following the link in my signature from this site?

2) Askimet is catching the spam, but should I or can I do anything to reduce this spam?

I'm not sure of the mechanics of how this works, so I'd like to learn more about it.

[_Aerospace_Eng_]

Because your blog is actually hosted on wordpress there wouldn't be much you can do because it would need to be something on the server side. Though if you are the only posting on the blog can you not just make it to where users can't post comments or are you wanting comments? If thats the case then you might have to host your blog else where so you can customize it. Using some type of captcha program might help but as I said it would need to be something on the server side in order to work.

[Pennimus]

I don't see the problem - Akismet is doing it's job = there is nothing to worry about.

[Karen S. Garvin]

Right. It hasn't been a problem because of Askimet. I'm wondering how the spam is finding me, that's all.

At some point I might want to host this blog myself and I want to know what I'll be up against.

[Pennimus]

Well you've got links littered all over the place, bots could be finding the site from any one of them including this forum. Or, doing a wordpress site search, or scraping lists of known wordpress blogs. Who knows - stopping them finding you is an unwinnable battle.

It's not like you can't install akismet on a self hosted blog though.