[extropy-chat] Blog spam

[Emlyn]

This came up on the list recently, but now it's starting to get to me.
I've got a blog at VirtualEmlyn.blogspot.com, which until recently has
been very well behaved. Now I'm getting this amazing blog spam.

Every time I post, I get one or more replies, which come so quickly
that they are obviously automated. They were all anonymous before, so
I changed my settings to require a blogger user login before people
could comment. Now I'm getting spam from what are either bot generated
users or throwaway user profiles hand generated by spammers.

Have a look at the comments on my blog entries, the dates and times,
and the links in the to spammer stuff. This is one that I found as I
crawled back through user profiles:
http://www.theonlinepromoters.com/.

I get the impression that spammers think that what they are doing is
ok. I do kind of like it when it's creative (some of the nigerian
email variants out there are real works of art). But so much of it is
dumb :-(

In the end, it's my fault. I've put my blogs somewhere that I should
not have, on the Joe Sixpack ghetto service (blogger.com), and now I'm
paying for it. Time to relocate to somewhere a bit more boutique, with
less users and a bit more geek cred (and savvy!). Or maybe just
implement my own stuff, now that my website is coming together.

Now the compulsory "open up the floor" question. What's a good free
blogging service? Recommendations?

--
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *