Tag Archives: Spam

I Think I’ll Have the Lobster Thermidor!

October 12, 2012 1:33 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Just yesterday, I installed what I thought was a really excellent WordPress plugin that allowed readers to submit guest posts directly to my WordPress dashboard.

The plugin looked to be exactly what I needed. It submitted posts into the pending queue for moderation, automatically tagged them as Guest Posts, assigned the author and added what I thought was a really slick facility to the site. Today, just 24 hours later, I was genuinely surprised to find over 200 spam ‘articles’ deposited in my pending queue.

Many of those ‘articles’ – I use the word very loosely here – did not even have titles written using words! There were hundreds of entries with titles such as ‘xghgjh w mxnb zxbvc fh gfsg’ – what do you make of that? Clearly someone has written a ‘tool’ – again, very loose usage of the word – that permits people to submit these junk entries to blogs that have the plugin installed.

The only reason I can imagine is that some people may have their plugin set up to automatically publish content rather than to submit it to the pending queue. Thank goodness my blog was not configured that way or else, this morning, it would have been full of rubbish.

Looking inside a few of the posts just to see if I could get my head around what these people are trying to achieve, I found what I had expected - all kinds of links to dodgy websites. What puzzles me is that, for the most part, there was no attempt to disguise the submission as an article at all.

There was just one submission that might qualify as some kind of article, though not the kind we are looking for here. Needless to say, that plugin is now toast! So, for guest post submissions, we are back to a manual process and I think this may be the way it will need to stay because, in fact, it was working quite well.

To submit a guest post, all you need do is use the Contact Form to send me your proposal. If it looks interesting, I will contact you and let you know how to submit the article. Until we find a better way, this is how we will continue to work.

And for aficionados …

Customer: Morning.

Waitress: Morning.

Customer: What have you got?

Waitress: Well, there’s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam; spam, sausage, spam, spam, spam, bacon, spam tomato and spam; spam, spam, spam, egg and spam; spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.

(Choir: Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam! Lovely Spam! Lovely Spam!)

Or Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce served in a provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and a fried egg on top and spam.

Spam, in all its forms, is a truly irritating commodity.

Posted in: Blogging, Guest Posts, White Dove Books ⋅ Tagged:

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam

September 23, 2012 11:01 am ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

As the moment, there are 46 spam comments in my blog waiting to be moderated; in other words, deleted! I get perhaps a dozen or so per day and it constantly amazes me to see what inane garbage some people decide to post. So that led me to think about writing an article on the subject of spam.

The reason people post these ridiculous comments is, of course, that they want to obtain a link from my blog to their website. As you are probably aware, Google uses inbound links as part of their algorithm for ranking sites in their index. Most of the spammers use automatic tools to post, and they blast a single comment out to many thousands of blogs simultaneously, hoping to get a small percentage through the defences of the hosting blogs.

Spam comments are generally easy to spot. You often don’t even need to read them to see them for what they are. They are often full of links – a dead giveaway – or they comment on completely irrelevant pages such as my archives page, saying how wonderfully well it is written – clearly not from a human.

For a bit of fun, I thought I would show you the kind of comments we often get, so here are some examples:

That is really attention-grabbing. You are an overly professional blogger. I have joined your rss feed and look forward to looking for extra of your wonderful posts. Also, I have shared your website in my social networks

Firstly, it was posted against the archives page and secondly, it is far too generic a comment; in fact, it is one I get repeatedly. This is a sheer lack of creativity on the part of the spammer.

Woah this weblog is wonderful I love reading your articles. Stay up the good work! You know, many persons are hunting round for this info, you can help them greatly.

Again a very generic comment. This kind of comment is designed to massage the ego of the blogger. But the phrase ‘stay up’ is also a giveaway, clearly it is the result of an automatic spin of the more colloquial ‘keep up’.

Thanks for another informative web site. Where else may I am getting that kind of info written in such an ideal way? I’ve a venture that I’m simply now working on, and I’ve been at the glance out for such info.

This person has been on the ‘glance out’ – what? Again, he needs a better phrase spinner – it should have been, of course, ‘look out’.

By the way, those comments are some of the better ones, at least in terms of spelling and grammar, despite the fact that they are (I want to say ‘simply’ but I’ll resist the temptation) very badly written.

Actually, I love getting comments from readers. But, as I have said before, we don’t publish every comment. We don’t even publish every comment we get from real people. We publish thoughtful comments submitted by people who genuinely have something interesting to add to the discussion.

People don’t need to agree with me to get published here. But they do need to be able to spell, punctuate, write in sentences – and actually make a bit of sense!

Posted in: Blogging, Humour ⋅ Tagged:

Kindle Spam Problem – Update

January 21, 2012 1:37 pm ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

In a nutshell - we won!

You may remember that I wrote about the issue of Kindle spam here and here. Essentially, people were uploading our free books to Kindle and then selling them. Actually, I didn’t really mind people selling them (well most of them), but there were a number of problems with the way they were doing it.

One problem was that the formatting looked terrible on Kindle because of the way the images were displayed, so it was a poor user experience. Another was that people were erroneously crediting me as the author of certain books I did not write. I have a simple rule: if it says ‘by Will Edwards’ then it was written by me; if it doesn’t, it wasn’t – simples!

Yet another problem was that some of our free books simply did not permit people to resell them. An example of this was Judith Tramayne’s book Train Your Brain. Judith kindly allows us to give her book away but the rights quite clearly state that it may not be resold. That didn’t stop these spam merchants and, at least at first, the people at Amazon did not seem to want to tackle the problem.

Of course, when we originally put together the free books section, the Kindle did not exist, so we never foresaw any of these difficulties. The advent of the Kindle meant that we needed to revise our Terms of Service which now expressly forbids people to publish our books on the Kindle platform.

After writing to Amazon perhaps half a dozen times and contacting them via their web services on a number of occasions, I was eventually contacted by them this week to be told that all offending titles would be removed from the Amazon site. Today, I checked the site and it seems that this has now been completed.

Within the next couple of weeks, we will be reformatting all of the books in our free section and introducing a new way of rebranding so that people will be able to legitimately make money simply by giving them away. It is a really exciting idea and I can’t wait to get it off the ground. The only problem is time: I now have over 100 books to reformat.

So there you go. Hopefully, the Kindle issue is now closed, but be sure you understand that you may not publish our free books to the Kindle platform. In addition, watch out for a future announcement about our new rebranding facility. If you are looking for a way to make money from our free books, I feel sure that you are going to absolutely love the idea.

Posted in: Free Books ⋅ Tagged: ,