Sunday, March 14, 2010

Somebody out there bugs me

Over the past several weeks I've been getting erratic comments from that universal coward, Anonymous. Some comments are shopping links, some are porn links and the one from today is just plain nonsense.

It reads verbatim:
"Genial brief and this post helped me alot in my college assignement. Say thank
you you on your information."

It's dated 3/14 at 6:20 am DST. I might add that this comment was posted on the blog of my granddaughter's family picture!

I have been regularly deleting these comments. However, I'm becoming worried and confused about it--not to mention annoyed. Does anyone have a handle on where these come from and how to stop it? Has my blog been compromised in some way? Does anyone else have a problem with this?

I'd appreciate comments from everybody except *&%!#! Anonymous!

10 comments:

gayle said...

I am getting the same ones. Not sure where they are coming from. Hopefully someone can help.

Kittie Howard said...

I don't know where this comes from either. Keep deleting. And, Ms Sparrow, you certainly DO deserve an award. You've been faithfully following me with your insightful comments for some time. It's as you like to accept, post, but is sincerely given.

^..^Corgidogmama said...

Those creeps, I don't know why they do it, or what they get out of polluting our posts like that.
They hit just about everyone sooner or later. Grrrr, keep deleting! Irritatin' isn't it?

Nancy/BLissed-Out Grandma said...

Most of these are robotic web crawlers. You can do a couple of things. Go to your layout or dashboard page and click on Settings, and then Comments.

(1) Under "Who can comment?" you can change from "Anyone" to registered users, to prevent anonymous comments.

(2) Under "Comment moderation," you can click yes, meaning you get to approve all comments before they appear.

(3) "Show word verification for comments?" You can click yes, and most of the automated spam things will be blocked. This is the easiest and least drastic thing to do, although some people hate to type in the word verification. (I just turned my word verification off, but I am starting to get a few spam messages and if they increase I'll turn it on again.)

Daughter Number Three said...

If you haven't already, definitely do what BLissed-Out Grandma recommends. However, you may still get these types of comments because sometimes they are actually being done by extremely low-paid people rather than robots. It's link spam, meant to increase search engine rankings or possibly draw traffic from people who are not paying enough attention to recognize a spammer.

Daughter Number Three said...

I would say that I have my blog set to registered users only and enabling the captcha (the official name for the letter-entering filter), but not restricting it to comment moderation, and I've had only a few of these get past the captcha.

Joanna Jenkins said...

Ugh. I used to get the "college assignment" comment all the time-- usually on my older posts though. I changed my comments to require moderation if they comment on a post older than 14 days old and the "junk" slowed down a lot.

Sorry for the hassle. Hope your week is good.
jj

Holly, the Old Western Gal said...

As the others have mentioned, these people who are commenting aren't even aware of anything about your bloggie. They are paid to place links on as many posts as they can. Sometimes they don't post a link in the comment body, but they hope that someone will click on their name and then be taken to some dumb profile about "buy cheap electronics" or other money-related information. Often they are in other countries so their English sounds very odd. Delete 'em and don't worry at all about them.

Ms Sparrow said...

Thanks for all the reassuring advice, fellow bloggers. I feel so much better!

Lia said...

I was going to say pretty much the same as others have said.
I think a lot of people get these, the best thing to do is to do what some of the others have said there is some very sound advice there.
Good luck.
Much love
Lia
xx