This is what a spambot looks like. In my head.
I’m sure lots of you run your own websites, but I have to admit, this is my first. And what I’ve discovered is that with increased traffic comes annoying little things called spambots. I’ve heard the term before, but I had no idea how much they could drive you crazy. Yesterday I had to manually delete about 150 messages that were advertisements for some really gross stuff. Plus, I think they slow the site down a little, which stinks. So to all of you out there running sites and dealing with this very same problem, I salute you.
I have a plugin on my wordpress site that seems to catch about 99.9% of spam comments. This is something I’ve been scratching my head at! I’m getting around 100-200 spam comments a day at the minute!
I have two separate e-mails; one which I usually try to direct spam to. From what I know, spambots search for the “@” in e-mail addresses, which is why some people write out their e-mails literally as: “Name(at)Location.com”– or make their e-mail an image so that bots can’t read it (like captcha). There’s others that look for the “mailto:” link directlly from the html/script. Like diseases, spambots and viruses are always evolving and people need to keep coming up with new antispam/antispyware to block them as they show up