The Best Way To Deal With Comment Spam And Impersonators Thumbnail

Spammers are annoying, but thanks to technology we’ve got great tools like Akismet to keep most of them at bay. Furthermore, I’ve realized spammers can be a great way to earn passive income!

From a spammer’s point of view, if they can send out 1 million spam messages and just get 1% to go through due to an unsuspecting blogger or a hole in the spam protector, then the spammer is doing his job. 1% of 1 million is still 10,000 spam messages let loose in the world!

The Feds have cracked down on text spammers, blog spammers, and e-mail spammers over the years with increasing force. I remember one AOL spammer seven years ago facing 11 years in prison. On the fine side, each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000. See the FTC website for more. Being a professional spammer is not what you want to do for a living.

RECOMMENDED ANTI-SPAM PLUGINS

I recommend everybody install two anti-spam plugins: 1) Akismet and 2) Growmap Anti Spambot. Growmap is the plugin where the user has to check the box to make sure the comment goes through. Easy peasy. I can’t stand the CAPTCHA tool which forces you to copy some hard to read word.

The more you make your readers jump through hoops, the less they will comment. Make it easy for them to communicate. The comment system on WordPress is one of the main reasons why folks who use Blogger should switch. Blogger’s comment system is cumbersome.

Once you’ve got Akismet and Growmap Anti Spambot installed, you’re good to go for 99% of all your spam issues. But I recently found another issue I found amusing and sad which I want to address.

DEALING WITH IMPERSONATOR SPAM

Most spam is automated through a system. There’s no possible way a human being could send out millions of mindless spam individually. To do so would be the world’s biggest waste of time. But there are some who love wasting time.

There may be a point where some loser wants to impersonate you to sully your reputation on your own site. This is what recently happened to me as someone used my name, e-mail, and URL to respond to readers on FS as me. His words were unkind and belligerent.

He literally wrote over 200 individual impersonator comments on my site of which 20 got through. I’m sad that someone has so much time to waste rather than go out enjoy life like I was doing when he was spamming. He literally had to type in a different name and e-mail for each of his spam comments. So how did his spam get through Akismet and Growmap? Let me tell you how.

The first thing to realize is that Akismet does NOT keep my comments in spam folder because I’ve never marked my own comments as spam. I’m auto approved. What the impersonator first did was slip in an innocent comment in an old post under my name that I wouldn’t notice. After he saw that comment go through, he ramped up the negative spam. Obviously I deleted everything after seeing it and he laid low for a day.

Then the impersonator left an innocent comment using another name which I mistakenly approved. He spent time addressing the subject of the post and leaving a thoughtful comment. And once that comment was approved, he then changed his tone and used my name and other names to manually spam another 15 comments. I deleted everything once again.

By this time I was highly intrigued that someone would spend so much energy and time to impersonate me and spam my site. I was hiking with my friends when this latest episode was going on so I asked them to take a water break with me as I dealt with the situation in under a minute.

Here’s how:

1) Go to Dashboard –> Settings –> Discussion
2) Scroll down to the box that says “Comment Moderation”
3) Input all the IP addresses the spammer has used
4) Input your own name / handle
5) Click Save Changes
6) Input the spammer’s IP address in the comment search field and mark as spam and then delete all comments to make sure you didn’t miss any comments that already went through.
7) Add the IP addresses to your Firewall if you no longer want to earn passive income from the spammer.

I finished off the eight mile hike with my friends and checked my spam comments when I got home. Voila! Over 150 comments sat in the spam folder from the impersonator at the IP address 91.233.249.50 and 91.233.249.51. The guy literally typed over 150 different comments with different names and e-mail addresses over the next several hours while I was hiking. The comments are real comments because many of them tried to address a post, say something bad, or say something good to trick me into approving.

EMBRACE SPAM TO GROW YOUR SITE

If you actually get a human spammer or impersonator, it’s time to go out and celebrate! You’ve successfully rattled someone’s cage and got someone to spread the word about your site, boost your traffic and earn more ad revenue based on CPM, and maybe even CPC. The spammer will proceed to read everything you write and also read all your archives because they’re obsessed. Once you’ve created a system where even your enemies can’t help but come back to read what you write every time you post, you know you’re making a difference and growing.

What about getting back at them? There’s no need to waste your time on retribution because technology is doing all the work for you. All their angst and time wasted on you is retribution enough because you know that means they’re not spending time with a loved one, building a business, or enjoying life. Let them go backwards while you keep going forward.

All you’ve got to do is implement my anti-spam techniques and you won’t have to do much of anything afterward. If you’d like, keep a record of his spam by taking snapshots because you’ll get to fine him $16,000 for each spam and maybe even more for impersonation if you decide to take things a step further. My spammer has racked up penalties of close to $5 million while he wastes his life away. How cool is that? Happy blogging!

Bloggers, have you ever had a manual spammer or impersonator? How did you deal with him or her?

Regards,

Sam