Fighting spam

There’s another of those Q&As coming soon – this time my answers to questions from a Chelsea site – and this is just a bit of pre-season housekeeping.

But I wanted to salute Will, Sam and the others at footballunited.com for having, overnight, passed the 5,000 mark in blocking a path to this site for the cretins, charlatans and geeks who make up the fast-growing international army of internet spammers.

The success of the filter means you don’t have to wade through anything up to 100 bogus comments which these internet slugs, in the course of trying to flog Viagra, dubious money-making ruses and a host of apparently legitimate services and products, try daily to dump onto to each piece published here about Sunderland, or football generally.

The downside is that I have to moderate all comments from people who have not posted previously, or are using a hitherto unknown IP address from which to send their perfectly genuine thoughts on the subjects we raise. That means I have to sift through the “pending” box each day, often several times daily, to sort out the real stuff from the spam. That explains the delay that sometimes occurs between your response to a piece and its appearance here.

If you really want to read more, I have discussed the 5,000 milestone in more detail at my Salut! site.

As I explain there, some of the attempts are worryingly clever, picking out words and topics from actual posts so that, at first glance, the fraudulent comments may seem above board. There’s even one – and it may be genuine or semi-genuine – that mixes classic spamming techniques with a professed soft spot for SAFC and an accurate reference to the content.

But thanks are due to footballunited.com for putting up such an effective barrier to spamming drivel.

Colin Randall

2 thoughts on “Fighting spam”

  1. We’re happy to be of help Colin 🙂

    It’s a shame a perfect system doesn’t exist – but we’ll always work towards the highest level of protection available

    In other news – your new menu system is close to being ready – we’ve been testing hard on our inhouse server 🙂

    Sam

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