How would you deal with splogs?

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007

I’ve noticed a reduction in recent weeks in spam hitting my site but an increase in splogs—fake blogs—stealing my RSS feed content. Does this mark a change in tactics on the part of the parasites? If so, it’s leading me to contemplate the formerly unthinkable.

My blog has been around for a very long time now. Well, I think it’s been around for a long time. I first started producing content for The Spicy Cauldron in August 2004. I guess the longer a blog is maintained, the greater the risk of interference from undesirables because with each passing day, month and year they’ve got more chance of finding your site via search engines as more and more of your pages get indexed.

A long-running blog is like a pot of honey getting bigger and bigger, not being noticed by bees but by predatory wasps.

I am tired of the crap that buzzes round the Internet attaching itself wherever and whenever it can.

I’ve been using the AntiLeech plugin for quite a long time now, but it seems only effective after the fact—i.e. I notice a splog stealing my content and so I add its IP address into the trap. But the content already leeched is unaffected, and splogs vanish as quickly as they materialise only to be replaced by new splogs. Adding in the IP address of an offender would work only if the offender tries to steal more content from you, which invariably does not happen.

Every splog appears to operate in a hit-and-run, one-time-only manner. It’s an effective means of maintaining maximum annoyance. The people setting up these fake blogs don’t even have to manually start new splogs—they use automation to infest the free services such as Blogger.

I’ve long taken care to protect this site from spam comments, as much as anyone can, by using the best available plugins to great effect. Yet none of them are 100 per cent reliable. Still, thousands of spam messages are trapped for every one that gets through. But the spammers never give up. Lots of bloggers don’t even dare mention spammers in their entries because many have been targetted for speaking out against the rising tide of junk with floods of garbage.

It might happen here. I know. But online thuggery is no different to real-world thuggery. It won’t go away if we keep our silence.

I frankly don’t know what to do about the splog explosion. If there was an effective or at least ninety-percent effective solution, I’d be using it. I’m not aware of one. Yet. WordPress plugin developers, please note: anti-splog tools are becoming essential and so far I’ve only found one, referenced above.

I’m seriously thinking of shutting down the site and moving to pastures new. I wouldn’t want to lose my content, which as much as anything else forms a diary of sorts going back several years, so I’d have to be able to export everything into a new corner of cyberspace with a new blog title and domain name. Of course, were I to do that I’d have to build up a readership again and I’d face the same problem eventually. The splogs and spammers might find the new site in a year or a day, or anything in-between. But they would find it, and I’d be back at square one.

I’m not keen to take such a drastic step but the fact that I’m even voicing it as a possibility shows how fatigued I am by the tide of rubbish.

Alternatively I could close the site to comments but to me that would be like a runner chopping off both legs—I’m a blogger and, for me, blogging is about interacting with your readers, getting to know them, valuing what they have to say as much as they, presumably, value what you write. There might, however, be a compromise of sorts—I recall seeing a plugin a long time ago that closed comments on older posts past a certain ‘age’. But while spammers tend to target older entries, splogs seem to raid your very latest posts. Plus I know of people who enjoy trawling the not-inconsiderable archives here, and they like to leave comments on entries as old as three or four years or more.

I’m not keen on that as an option, either. It’s less brutal but it still gives ground when, really, I want a weapon I can use against these filth-peddlers and content pirates. I want the means to fight back, and only wish I had the technical know-how to devote time to developing something. But I don’t.

So what do YOU think? Any advice? Ideas? Opinions?

categories: all wired up