Spammers new lows

I’ve been getting so much spam on my sites, it’s ridiculous. I don’t know how anyone can run a user-contributed site these days. As soon as you let people add content, the spammers come and plaster their ads for diets, jobs, handbags, shoes – everything you can think of. This is despite the use of algorithmic spam blockers that filter out obvious keywords like viagra and louboutin shoes.

Every day I’ve been deleting around 50 spam craft posts on halloween-australia.com. I had already disabled the forums and comments, due to spam (to all but trusted members).

Christmas-Australia.com was also getting hit in a massive way. So I sadly turned off all user-contributed text sections, except the creation of Church Service listings. Surely spammers wouldn’t be so low as to falsely create Church records?

But they were. So now I’ve had to disable that, as well. The only thing left is the Christmas WishList and Letter to Santa. And it probably won’t take long for them to work out the Letter to Santa. But I think I’ll stop those from being indexed at Google – it’s the least I can do.

Why do these people waste our time?