The web world changes and we move on.

The advent of Twitter and other chatterbox facilitators has considerably reduced the number and quality of comments on tech sites and blogs.

There are some exceptions, like natural community sites — our Royal Anecdotes is a good example. But generally, comments are old hat.

So, because of the countervailing increase in spam comments, we have now turned them off across our network, with the exception of RA. Our new technology will instantly mark every comment as spam and delete it.

We may reverse this decision for individual posts, in which case you will see “Comments On” at the bottom of the post.

I’ve also decided to go full feed for RSS readers as they are now so user friendly most geeky readers don’t bother with individual sites any more.

Readers can, of course, still contact us at the email address shown in the footer.

I’m looking for anyone who can bring a little vorsprung durch technik to a “simple” WordPress problem.

We have a site with 23,000 spam comments in the moderation panel. WordPress only allows zapping 20 at a time, or a huge process of downloading the whole mess bucket, which invariably hangs the computer.

I’m seeking a quick way to zap the lot, maybe serverside using the MySQL panel. Has any bright spark got a handle on this?

Reward in Heaven.

Have you noticed the increase in pingback comment spam recently? Our mod panels are full of the stuff.

Much of it seems to come via a gentleman by the name of Elliott Back, who is listed as having a legitimate web design and software business, and writes a blog about Cornell University.

All very respectable, you might think. Then why write the kind of software that monitors keywords in other people’s posts, presumably through Technorati, then scrapes a section of the post automatically onto an untreated WordPress install and sends a pingback to the unfortunate author?

Some sites now lift whole articles for reprint, without permission. Inevitably, the posts are surrounded by great wodges of Adsense blocks.

This is what his website has to say :

I’m not some city slicker looking for a fast buck, or a country boy who’s never seen w-e-b-twooo-point-oh. I do what I like, and I do it well. Whether it’s branding, web presence, search engine optimization, blogging, coding, service-oriented architecture, java, php, facebook development, rich internet applications, mobile developement, web services, thick-client guis, debugging, q&a, testing, or documentation, I’m your man.

He’s obviously a man of talent who could be a useful presence around the web, especially for bespoke pieces of software for particular tasks. Why then the dark side, ripping off other folk’s work for personal profit?

Oliver White at Knee High to a Grasshopper has a word for this flighty freelance :

“People like those who use the plugin that Elliott Back distributes are destroying the web, site owner by site owner. Its impact may be low, but it is those small-time publishers that make the internet such a diverse and wonderous place that it is. Tell me, why the f**k do you get to repeat my hard-worked content for your own f***ing gain? And without my permission?”

He now has many imitators, but his name crops up time and again in the pingbacks. These are all caught in the spam trap, but by then the content appears as duplicate material in the search engines.

Of course, quoting a segment of another’s post with link back is standard procedure on the web, but only as part of a freshly written piece which develops the original’s argument. It’s the machine-like mass production aspect of his method that makes it so pernicious.

Has anyone successfully scuppered this software’s ability to scrape their sites?

Update : Elliott Back has emailed me to say, “I wrote a plugin to import RSS items as blog posts because I wanted to aggregate my and some families members’ blogs into a single feed. I released it, spammers picked up on it, and now it’s killed but some people are still where did they get it from?) using it for spam. If you find spam sites, please DCMA them and get rid of them for good.”

As a followup to Saturday’s post when I wrote about the 3000 items of spam in one of my Gmail accounts, I’m now aware that someone is faking our domain : @syntagmamedia.com to send out spam emails.

The large number of Mailer Daemon emails we’re getting are the bounced returns from this criminal activity. Heaven knows how many are getting through.

So if you do get some strange emails purporting to be from us, consider that they are probably fake.

Martin Neumann has also been caught in this trap with his domain, theblogcolumnist.com, being used as a vehicle for similar stuff. #

Identity fraud on domain names seems to be the latest ploy and getting quite widespread.

The Gmail account I use for Google Alerts is awash with spam. This morning I awoke to nearly 3000 choice items of trash, a fair chunk sitting in my inbox, presumably because the spam filters couldn’t cope. Many were of the “Mailer Daemon” type, with faux bounced emails.

Let’s assume it’s a temporary glitch, although I’ve noticed more spam in my G-inboxes lately, as have others. However, if Google is “only human”, we’ve been sold a pup.

Makes you wonder, though, about the mentality of some of the spammers. A lot of spam is just so pathetic it can’t possibly serve any purpose to the sender beyond a malicious satisfaction at having thrown a gremlin in the works.

Other spam is clearly coordinated and comes from a single source. The spammer is playing a numbers game. Since the cost per email is virtually nil, he (why do I assume it’s a “he”?) only needs a small percentage to be opened, releasing “active content” (viruses, trojans, worms) onto the receiver’s computer. The mail containing attachments is the most dangerous.

It will then only be a matter of time before the host machine is acting as a zombie clone, spreading havoc and denial of service to specially targeted organizations, like banks or Government departments. In May, the Russian Government is alleged to have brought down the communications systems of Estonia is a similar move.

Spammers come in all shapes and sizes.

Other ploys are to harvest your personal information and report back to base, usually in Asia or behind the old Iron Curtain, which seems to be sprouting new shoots in the dying oil age.

Similarly, spam comments on blog-type websites are a real nuisance. Syntagma Media gets up to 500 a day on some of our sites. With more than 40 active sites, that’s a real problem.

Comment spam is different. Most is search engine oriented — attempting to get a backlink to improve rankings on barebones Adsense sites. It’s all about traffic and the numbers game. The “no-follow” rule doesn’t seem to put these people off, but then Yahoo! appears to ignore it, and many publishers just switch it off.

Others are just links to porn sites or phishing setups where your personal information is tricked from you to create cloned credit cards and raid bank accounts.

What a wearisome prospect it is to be online these days. It only shows how powerful the benefits of the internet are that we put up with the overt dishonesty to make use of it.