I need to come up with better process for dealing with spam being posted to this blog. My typical process is to just ignore the notifications I’m getting about replies to my posts and then occasionally delete 500 spam items, but when I’m preparing to delete, I always find the occasional real reply among the trash. I really don’t want to throw those babies out with the bath water. But I have adopted this procedure because I don’t want to spend time every day reviewing and deleting the trash.
In today’s deletions I noticed a range of university resources being hijacked by spammers. Below are example links (I left something off each link so it doesn’t point to the spammer’s content). If universities are having a problem with their systems begin compromised by spammers, what should be advocated to learners who are opting to manage their personal learning environments? Will spam force learners to retreat into closed web communities and what are the implications of that?
- http://www.isis.vanderbilt.edu/gmeforum/old/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=
- http://www.pucpr.edu/facultad/hvera/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=
- http://www.rso.cornell.edu/bangla/mboard0//msg/
- http://www.texastcm.edu/alumni/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=
- http://courses.forum.ncsu.edu/cgi-bin/netforum/st610e
- http://pine.ucc.nau.edu/kem43/_reqdis/
- http://www.pucpr.edu/facultad/hvera/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=
- http://volition.wustl.edu/cgi-bin/x/nph-proxy.cgi/
- http://cscserver.cc.edu/ti/_csc200WWdisc/
- http://reshall.iweb.bsu.edu/schmidtwilson/DiscussionBoard/
- http://www4.gu.edu.au/cgi-bin/netforum/ps01/a
We’re looking to implement Akismet, WordPress’ antispam system. Experience from my own blog shows that it’s pretty good at detecting spam and with very few false positives. It’s free for personal use too.
Mike, thanks. Between the time of my post and your comment I upgraded my WP and installed Akismet and agree it is working well. Thanks