{"id":34991,"date":"2026-10-23T00:01:52","date_gmt":"2026-10-23T07:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=34991"},"modified":"2026-10-22T21:33:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T04:33:09","slug":"spam-spam-go-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2026\/10\/23\/spam-spam-go-away\/","title":{"rendered":"Spam, Spam, Go Away"},"content":{"rendered":"<h6>By Joe Berk<\/h6>\n<p>Man, there is a lot of spam and there sure are a lot of malign actors floating around on the Internet.\u00a0 It&#8217;s picked up in recent weeks.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not sure why.<\/p>\n<p>WordPress, the blog hosting software we use, does a pretty good job of dumping spam comments in its trash folder.\u00a0 We had to tell it what to look for, which was fairly easy.\u00a0 If a comment has a link in it, or any Cyrillic alphabet characters, or a .ru in its email address, it goes straight to spam.\u00a0 I guess Russians are bad actors.\u00a0 It seems like they are more into this than any other nationality.\u00a0 I asked Google why we were getting so many spam comments, and here&#8217;s what it came back with:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ul>\n<li><em>SEO Link Building: Spammers want backlinks (incoming links pointing to their sites) to artificially boost their rankings in search engines.Automated<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Scripts: They do not target you personally. Instead, they use scripts and bought bot networks that blast thousands of blogs at the same time.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Targeting Older Posts: Bots frequently target older blog posts that you no longer monitor closely.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>The Numbers Game: On an unprotected blog, automated bots can make up over 75% of all incoming comment traffic.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Like I said, the WordPress software does a pretty good job of sending this crap directly into the trash folder, but every once in a while, a legit comment gets dumped there, too.\u00a0 Most days I look at the trash comments and restore the odd one or two that shouldn&#8217;t be there, but lately we&#8217;ve been getting upwards of a hundred or more spam comments daily.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t go through all of those as they tend to be lengthy (as in hundreds of words each).\u00a0 I simply click on the &#8220;empty trash&#8221; button and they all go away for good. If you&#8217;ve made a comment and it didn&#8217;t make it to our blog, my apologies; I inadvertently poured out the baby with the bathwater.\u00a0 Make it again and I&#8217;ll make sure it gets posted.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-34996\" src=\"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/nigerian-prince.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"506\" srcset=\"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/nigerian-prince.jpg 600w, https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/nigerian-prince-300x253.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The other form of spam comes via email, and that&#8217;s gone up sharply, too.\u00a0 It&#8217;s probably increased by a factor of four or five recently.\u00a0 I block and trash the spam emails when the new ones appear, but I fear I&#8217;m fighting a losing battle.\u00a0 It&#8217;s those damn Russians again, I think.\u00a0 I almost miss the Nigerian princes who needed my help to dispose of their hundreds of millions of inherited dollars.\u00a0 I guess they gave up on that con and turned their attention to running &#8220;Learing&#8221; Centers in Minnesota.\u00a0 I know, that&#8217;s the Somalians.\u00a0 But you get the idea.\u00a0 Russians.\u00a0 Nigerians.\u00a0 Somalians.\u00a0 It never ends.<\/p>\n<p>It would be nice if running a blog only involved taking cool pictures and writing.\u00a0 Spam management is now a big part of the job.\u00a0 It&#8217;s unfortunate, but it is what it is.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<style>\r\n        .wpedon-container .wpedon-select,\r\n        .wpedon-container .wpedon-input {\r\n            width: 171px;\r\n            min-width: 171px;\r\n            max-width: 171px;\r\n        }\r\n    <\/style><div class='wpedon-container wpedon-align-center'><form target='_blank' action='https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/cgi-bin\/webscr' method='post' class='wpedon-form'><input type='hidden' name='cmd' value='_donations' \/><input type='hidden' name='business' value='ExNotes@ExhaustNotes.us' \/><input type='hidden' name='currency_code' value='USD' \/><input type='hidden' name='notify_url' value='https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-admin\/admin-post.php?action=add_wpedon_button_ipn'><input type='hidden' name='lc' value='en_US'><input type='hidden' name='bn' value='WPPlugin_SP'><input type='hidden' name='return' value='' \/><input type='hidden' name='cancel_return' value='' \/><input class='wpedon_paypalbuttonimage' type='image' src='https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/en_US\/i\/btn\/btn_donateCC_LG.gif' border='0' name='submit' alt='Make your payments with PayPal. It is free, secure, effective.' style='border: none;'><img alt='' border='0' style='border:none;display:none;' src='https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/en_US\/i\/scr\/pixel.gif' width='1' height='1'><input type='hidden' name='amount' id='amount_8b95b1b28e79954d1e38079eb2d48016' value='' \/><input type='hidden' name='price' id='price_8b95b1b28e79954d1e38079eb2d48016' value='' \/><input type='hidden' name='item_number' value='' \/><input type='hidden' name='item_name' value='' \/><input type='hidden' name='name' value='' \/><input type='hidden' name='custom' value='23447'><input type='hidden' name='no_shipping' value='1'><input type='hidden' name='no_note' value='0'><input type='hidden' name='currency_code' value='USD'><\/form><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Joe Berk Man, there is a lot of spam and there sure are a lot of malign actors floating around on the Internet.\u00a0 It&#8217;s picked up in recent weeks.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not sure why. WordPress, the blog hosting software we use, does a pretty good job of dumping spam comments in its trash folder.\u00a0 We &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2026\/10\/23\/spam-spam-go-away\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Spam, Spam, Go Away&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[96],"tags":[5197,5198,5196],"class_list":["post-34991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feel-good-stuff","tag-comments","tag-online-criminal-scams","tag-spam"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/spamolia.jpg","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34991"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35001,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34991\/revisions\/35001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}