SPAM @ MoBlog Comments

Imagine receiving more than thirteen spam comments within a few days for a blog entry with people selling clothes and watches to pharmaceutical products and viagra, and there is NO WAY to stop it because MoBlog does NOT have a function to disable Guest's comment!


I am getting very frustrated blogging at Moblog because of endless spam at comments!

From my observation, it appears the spammer may have used a computer program to search for blogs with keywords like 'christmas' or 'thanksgiving' to target their ads via a script, which automatically places their comments in blogs. The script is generated over and over again without the spammer having to lift a finger, and as victims, we can only painstakingly remove them one by one on a regular basis, unless someone place them on the block list. Sadly in this case, the spammer users the 'Guest' account to comment, so there is no way to block the sender specifically. This method of flooding ads on blogs' comments is known as auto-spam bots by the techies.

I have begged Moblog Support to do something about it, but they simply thanked me for the feedback and said they will look into having the solution in the next version. Last I remember when Moblog Support tells me they will include feature like 'Comic Sans MS' font in the next release, it was about a year ago and till this day, I am still waiting for it to happen.

When I begged them a second time for a current workaround, their reply was:

As much as we feel your frustration of being continually spammed by bots, we sadly cannot lend immediate assistance. If you find that only one of your blogs is being bombarded by spam, we advise you to delete that blog and create new entry. Because thus far, you are the only one who has complaints about excessive spam comments.

I am not sure whether I will be staying with Moblog anymore, considering the problems I am facing now. Hope they will do something soon.

Living With Junk

We are always faced with junk everyday, handbills at our doorsteps, junk in our snail and electronic mail boxes, and junk in our bins.

In my blacklist for junk producers, ERA property agents top the list of paper junk. Before mail boxes were modified to refrain from targets of junk, I used to receive an average of fifteen to twenty handbills from ERA per week. These days I still receive junk papers from ERA at my doorsteps, and they serve as reminders not to use them when I need to sell my house. That is the kind of reaction consumers will get as a result of persistent junk marketing. I sometimes wonder whether anyone tells companies like them how many trees they are killing each day to use this form of marketing which is not only ineffective, but also a waste of everybody's time. Is it therefore justifiable for a handful of responses to result in the immense volume of junk being created?

Another kind of junk is the marketing e-mails we receive in our electronic mail boxes. The creators of such junk are the e-Marketers who often use net crawlers to obtain every e-mail addresses available on the Internet in order to send materials of their products or services using spiral marketing that persistent send junk to our e-mail accounts. Attempts to filter all e-mail junk through conditional settings in e-mail systems cannot completely eliminate or place junk into the trash automatically, hence it is quite fruitless to spend too much money on such filtering software applications.

Till this day, there is still no perfect method of eliminating junk in e-mail systems, and despite that, iDA has proposed in their legislation for an opt-out regime in electronic marketing. This means in essence that marketers can now send junk e-mails to anyone in Singapore legally or put anyone's e-mail address in their permanent mailing list for regular spamming, so long as the individual do not opt out from such marketing materials. This idea of opting out or unsubscribe from a mailing list is however impractical, because getting in is easy, but getting out is not. In fact, by sending an unsubscribe request, devious marketers can use the information as a confirmation of e-mail address validity and hence result in more marketing targets.

For more information on the proposed legislation on e-mail marketing and spamming, please read my article to The Straits Times forum page, "Opt out of proposed law."