Recently I've been getting oodles of spam comments to my 3FC blog. Yesterday I had a dozen or so and a week or two ago there was also a day when I got another couple dozen. I just delete them (using the spam it option) but I was curious if others with 3FC are seeing this happen.

Could you check something in your blog settings for me? From your blog dashboard, click the 'settings' tab over to the right. The first section you should see is "general settings". Look at the 4th option "User must be logged in and registered to comment". If this is checked, it will help cut down on spam. If it is checked, please send me a PM with the username of the spammers and I'll remove them since they'll be registered in the database.

Thanks!

I've also gotten spam on my blog. In the comments. I thought I had my settings correct. The comments left sound 'nice' enough. But the links left aren't anything I want on my blog page. How do I prevent this?

thank you for this! i was combing the settings trying to find what box to check to get the spammers off my blog! it was drivin me bonkers. i didn't think to look under the 'general' tab.

Oh gosh, that's the latest trend in blog spam. They post a generic message saying the blog is great, but include their website url in the url field. Chances are they were never even on your blog, but it was automatically posted by a script that is programmed to paste the same comment all over the internet. It might be tempting to allow the comment because it does seem nice enough, but it's just a new shade of spam. My advice would be to change your settings to make sure they are registered, as described above. Then make sure your comments are set to manually approve and not allow them to automatically appear. If a registered user is posting the comments, please let me know their username so I can ban them from the blogs.

Thanks

Thank you! I went in and changed all my old posts so they didn't accept comments before I saw your instructions about the "registered users". My box wasn't checked but it is now.

I think it is an auto bot because I missed one of my 65 entries when I was setting them all to "no comments" and right away the spammers found that one unblocked entry.

Now I've got the registered users box clicked so I should be all set. I really love and appreciate my blog and being able to go back and see what I was thinking or doing a year ago.

thanks again (especially for the whole 3FC site which is so important to my new found healthy way of living!)

It seems like there has been a lot of spam on the forums these days too! I live in Asia and around 12- 4 PM when most folks are asleep and I'm the only one on 3FC () it is suddenly full of spam posts in different languages, advertising products, and the "nice" sort of comments that are posted identically throughout the site. Strange! Is this related to the increased spamming of 3FC blogs?

You'll see more spam during those hours because that's when our mods are asleep. I hate to say it, but almost all of our forum spam traces to IPs in Asia and India so more spam appears when those countries are up and around. Members report the spam and the mods work on the reports after they are up. There's a lot less forum spam now because tech installed a filter that blocks new registrations that appear on a database of known spammers. Unfortunately that feature doesn't exist in the blogs.


Btw I just learned about the forum spam assault that happened last night. That type of thing is highly unusual. Mod mandalinn82, was up for several hours in the middle of the night catching and cleaning it up. The spammers were new and not in the database of known spammers, so they slipped through. We appreciate the reported posts that helped her track them down, and greatly appreciate the time she took to take care of it.

Interesting, Suzanne, thanks for the explanation. Is having users with IP addresses in Asia/India adding to the problem? If so I can use 3FC on a proxy server to place me in the US.

Also, if there's anything that we in the Eastern hemisphere can do to report spam, like the attack that happened last night, without overwhelming the mods, do let me know as I tend to be awake and active on 3FC at those times!

Thanks for all the work you and the rest of the mods do to keep this a wonderful, user-friendly site

If you click the "Report" button once, for one of the spam-fest messages, it'll notify us without being overwhelming. That would be really great! But if its a big spam-bomb, we'll probably find it anyway - so much spam is hard to miss!

I've been a mod here for years, and I've never seen such a hard-to-shut-down bot attack as we had two nights ago. It was a 3+ hour onslaught coming from many, many usernames, which all had to be individually banned and deleted. Thankfully, it's rare that we get an attack that bad. In the meantime, reporting spam posts (once per user that's spamming is perfect if you're worried about being overwhelming...we delete all the posts from the user when we ban) is a great way to help the mod squad keep the boards spam free.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that was ridiculous. I reported to or three spam posts in a row in a five minute period!

I'm happy to keep an eye out and report spam during non-US waking hours. The Jordan advertisements are driving me up the wall so anything I can do to help you all and keep 3FC spam-free I will!

One way of stopping forum spam is to approve all new members checking their email addys/servers. There are sites to help check them but the spammers are so well known just googleing the addys usually tells you what you want. Is there a way to "gateway" our blog section to our forum members (or is this something you would want to consider?)

Our forum database has something like that installed and flags all suspected spammer accounts and it works really well. Unfortunately there isn't anything like that available for the blogs I can ban email domains of known spammers but most seem to use gmail or other disposable email addresses which match our legitimate members, so it's a mess. Unfortunately, most of our bloggers do not have the comment restrictions set and anyone can comment without even registering first. Those are set on a blog by blog basis.

I do wish it were different.