Spam Policy

[joreth]

 Yes, spammers, I have noticed you posting anonymous comments in really old posts.  Your superficial, generic, and vague "compliments" on my posts do not blind me to the fact that you also posted a URL to some unrelated website that collects credit card numbers, phishes for email addresses, and installs cookies & spyware.  I am not so easily won over by flattery that I completely lose my intelligence.  Does that tactic ever work for anyone?

Your comments are deleted without ever seeing the light of day and your ip addresses are logged.

Comments

[the-failed-poet.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I get those on a bunch of my old posts. If I still used my LJ for anything but reading other people's blogs I'd be righteously pissed.

[ellindsey.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been getting those too. Pretty sure it's a bot.

[joreth]

Oh, I'm sure too. But I can't actually yell at the bots, or the idiots sending them. So I'm ranting in LJ - which is, apparently, what my LJ is for :-)

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

The sheer tedium of deleting 5-10 spam comments a day caused me to investigate the posting settings.

If you don't mind inconveniencing anonymous commenters, you can require an LJ handle to post comments, or at least auto-screen them so you don't have to manually delete them.

Spam comments

[ewen]

IIRC jwz (before he decamped from LJ completely) had a script (which he posted/linked to his LJ, about a year back) that he would run at the LJ admin interface to mark "old" posts (for some definition of old: 2-4 weeks, I think) as not accepting comments. Presumably with minor changes one could change it to limit who can post after some period of time and, eg, allow anon comments for a short period of time then lock down to LJ-handle only, or LJ-friends only (or screen those that aren't in one of those categories).

Sometimes I miss the old Internet where the problem was making sure that everything got through, not figuring out which 90% to reject out of hand :-(

Ewen

[joreth]

I do screen anonymous posts & I collect ip addresses from anonymous posts. Then, when I've evaluated it for spam (some anonymous posts are from people who just don't have LJ accounts), I delete them and report them. Which means ya'll never see those spam posts because they're never unscreened.

[ximinez]

As much as I like to complain about LJ's ineptitude and bad decsion-making, I'm so very thankful they gave us the "screen anonymous comments" option early on and have stuck with it.

[petite-lambda.livejournal.com]

One thing I still haven't figured out are the obviously spam comments (generic compliment on an old post) but *without* the spam link. A bug in the spamming software?
Do you get these, too?

[joreth]

I do get these, and as near as I can figure out, they're probably test emails to see if their comment gets through before sending more spam with links. I have no real evidence for it though, that's just my best guess for why anyone would waste coding for non-linked comments.