Popularity Contest Plugin And Spam

14 Dec

Posted by User Image Jay as Site News

For some time now, the most popular posts in the sidebar list have been put there by spam.

Online Opportunity is setup with my recommended settings for a spam free blog, so comment spam doesn’t make it into the public eye.

But the Popularity Contest plugin still counts each spam comment as a vote for the popularity of a post. So the popular posts are those that are most keyword targeted by spam bots.

I’ve zeroed out the weight comments play in popularity, but the spam bots are still officially visiting the post pages, so they still tend to rank highly based on traffic alone.

I may need to look into the Bad Behavior plugin, which is supposed to prevent spam bots from hitting the blog at all.

Has anyone else encountered this same issue?

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Popularity: 4% [?]

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2.5

6 Responses

ScottUA (Who am I?)

December 16th, 2007 at 5:27 pm Quote
1
Sorry to hear about your spam problems. I have some problems with it, but don’t go too crazy working at eliminating it. Just delete them all whenever I login to my site.
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2.9
jblu (Who am I?)

December 17th, 2007 at 5:07 am Quote
2
I delete them when I log-in also, although I have stopped using the popularity plugin and am experimenting with the web metrics plugin.
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2.9
Jay (Who am I?)

December 17th, 2007 at 5:42 am Quote
3
I generally get up to one hundred spam comments a day, so Akismet is a lifesaver for automatically getting rid of them.

I haven’t seen the web metrics plugin, do you have a link for that?
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2.5
Tom At The Home Business Archive (Who am I?)

December 17th, 2007 at 8:55 am Quote
4
I would be in huge trouble without the akismet plugin.I manually approve or delete every comment that comes to my blog, so no spam will ever get posted.Is there a better way to do this?
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2.5
Jay (Who am I?)

December 17th, 2007 at 9:01 am Quote
5
Hi Tom, if you set it up to have you approve first comments, but auto-approve subsequent comments, you’ll have a lot less work to do and still be pretty safe. Combined with Akismet, the only spam that hits the blog is that posted by someone you’ve already approved a comment for, and I haven’t had a spammer bother to post something real yet.

I’m also pretty strict about the comments I do allow through. “Great post” types usually don’t get approved, especially if they link to an affiliate site or spam blog.
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2.5
jblu (Who am I?)

December 17th, 2007 at 1:43 pm Quote
6
Here’s the link for web metrics
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2.9