Messageboar and comment spam is at an all time high, says MessageLabs anti-spam expert Matt Sergeant. Silicon.com reports:
"… [Sergeant] told silicon.com he’s seen a real increase in levels of message board spam, which he attributed in part to the growth in blogging and forums such as Wikipedia. Sergeant believes individuals and companies are abusing the system to increase their Google ranking, or increase the resale value of a domain name by raising its prominence. He said: "It’s a huge problem. They target wikis, blogs and message boards and once they have found a weakness they have programs which will keep coming back and exploiting them."
I have to say I’ve noticed it get a LOT worse in the last twelve months – if it wasn’t for some of the brilliant anti-spam plugins available for WordPress I’d have to disable comments completely because of the sheer volume of spam I get.
When I first upgraded to wordpress 2.0 last week I had to disable my plugins – there was 10 minutes without any spam protection and I recieved 85 spam comments that I had to delete.
Since re-enabling the plugins I’ve had about 4 get through.
I actually wonder what Sergeant meant by “message boards”. The ones based on WWW? Sure it sounds like a problem. Or did he mean Usenet (spamming of which is no news at all).
I second Ryan’s impression. A lot more comment spam can be seen around nowadays than in early 2005.