As I was about to write a next post on my website via WordPress, I encountered some mysterious comments, and there’s no possibility to figure out who left a reply on my post. I did have my anti-spamming tools installed,–helping to protect my multisite against spam comments, website usage, and spam social links posted on my social networking site. If you encountered this issue, most likely, bots are now capable of going around varification mechanisms, and post unsolicited content to your website, and your multisite network. Your robots.txt file isn’t immuned to these bad bots at this time. Spammers often use hosting providers to send spam to your website with automated software or scripts what they’ve developed. Professional scammers often mask their IP addresses, and even encrypt their sites to prevent detection by their own hosts. WordPress users may experienced this issue, and you may need to implement reputable anti-spam software to keep spambots at bay!
How Did I Experienced This?
For the past 3 years, combating spam on my multisite is a common activity what I was doing as I post new content. Although; spammers can be really clever as they go around CAPTCHA mechanisms, and even complex forms of keeping spammers at bay by using math, problem solving, and true/false questions,–and filling the blanks! Everyday, I was patroling my website for possible spammers who post spam comments as a way to flood my sites with unsolicited messages, unnecessary ads, and even scams.
How do you know if these comments are spam comments? Here are the following factors:
- Someone’s email address may be hijacked, or used without your consent – professional scammers make a living by using anyone else’s email address to post spam comments.
- Link to any website that may contain spam content, or product/service that isn’t a fit for a customer.
- Garbled typing with nonsense!
- Other spam comments with different forms.
We always fight comment spam as a way to keep our sites clean, and used by legitimate users who respond to our websites often.
As I write new content; my site did have anti-spam measures, but these measures appears to be worked around by bots created by spammers around the world. Like YouTube, spammers often spam our systems,–causing our site to lose resources. Even the first launch of my website… I still get spam messages, and spam comments that are linked to phishing sites.
Most hosting providers has implemented policies to keep spammers at bay. If you were a host of your platform, and you are receiving payments to keep your user’s site running to transmit spam, you are supporting a spammer. Professional spammers often use their tactics to keep them from being detected by many hosting platform administrators/managers. John Mroz is a known spammer who was promoting his money-making schemes that are scams, and speaking about John Mroz… he was terminated from YouTube, and he isn’t going to scam us online. However; his website is still online, and he’s been trying to find ways to keep his business at float. His website relies on WordPress… but he still has traffic on his website. Unfortunately, a host who is hosting his website hasn’t taken any action to remove John Mroz from their platform. Although; he can still make a backup of his website, and find a different host to host his spam content. Multi-level marketing is a known scheme what he was doing for many years.
There are common scam/spam messages what I encountered as I try to confirm if I have legitimate customers who wanted to advertise on my website. Sometimes, I can’t figure out who sent me an email. Maybe the headers has been fordged, email addresses stolen, or even hijacked messages. There’s no such software that will prevent spammers from hijacking your website with lots of spam content.
Blind website owners are extremely susceptible to spammers who were trying to sell you a product/service, subscriptions to unsolicited products, illegal downllloads/streaming/torrents, pirated software/movies/games/services, hijacked platforms, knockoffs, dating escorts, etc. Trust me… that happens!
How Do I Combat Spammers?
I use the following tools to combat spammers/scammers:
- Math solving on contact forms – This is my prefered way to keep spambots/spammers at bay. Why I use this method because, that enable blind users to easily use my forms to contact me, ask about advertising offers on my website, etc. This is useful if any of these reputable tools has been circumvented by bots!
- Used honeypot fields on contact forms – this is my favorite part to keep spammers at bay, that can trap these bad bots because, these bots can abuse your form, and flood your email with unwanted email. Reputable tools like this can still be circumvented by professional spammers. It’s like a spammer sending you mail without an original address from a place where it was received from.
- Implemented policies against spamming – this is my favorite way to keep spammers at bay. I created an experimental TOU page to let spammers know why I’ll never tolerate spam under any circumstances. Most website operators implement this, and I am still trying to master this, and I’m still going forward.
I also delete spam comments,–after I marked these comments as spam.
Spam is like being blown up bombers who were trying to rig your system, and cause it to fail.
What You Should Do?
Always add protections to protect your site against spam, and unsolicited content posted by scammers/spammers. Tightening your site’s security is necessary to help your site become a spam-free place for your visitors.
Enforce policies against spam.
You can also edit your robots.txt file to disallow bad bots from entering your website. If you can manage to block all spam bots, your website may experience less traffic from bots overtime. If you were a skilled person who runs a website; you can block as many bad bots you want. If you blocked over 100 bad bots; your file will grow larger overtime as you add more lines to it.