Fighting Spam!

Now that we’ve tried to make it easier for people to add content, it seems like the spammers have taken to adding a ton of links that just don’t belong. It’s been a real battle to keep up with the mess that they are making. There are a bunch of add-ins and extensions that we’ve added to limit the spam (like Akismet – thank you WordPress!) that have worked well for most of the spam.

Remember my post about adding comments? These blockers didn’t work on it. In the end we had to modify the code to not allow any block of text that has an http or ftp. I really hate it. As a blogger and someone trying to build a website, I really want to allow people to add links to the site that are relevant. The problem is that these spammers have made it impossible to trust anyone. 

When we started, we thought that we’d allow links to be followed. That lasted about 2 days. We added nofollow to all links to stop the spam, but it kept on coming. 

The problem works on both sides. I am looking for some link love to The Pet Wiki, but I can’t get it because no one is allowing links to be followed. I have only written on other peoples blogs where I have knowledge and something good to add. I hope Google figures out what to do about this. If not, there is no hope for anything new. 🙁