I’ve been getting a load of Russian-language comments on my blog in the past couple of weeks. Yet my google analytics doesn’t report any visitors coming from Russia. How can this be?
Google Search for “russian comment spam”. Apparently this is a common habit for spammers coming from Russia. The only real way I have to block it is to block all posts coming from the .ru TLD, which is unfortunate because I actually have received friendly comments from people in Russia.
The spams usually have some non sequitur kind of thing to say, occasionally praising the author or the validity of the post – with the user’s home page being a link to a porn site, a pizza delivery site, a movies download site … etc. I paste the comment into translate.google.com to see what it says, usually I can understand what the translation means. I ask my girlfriend what these comments say when we’re both home from work (she’s fluent in Russian).
So this is the choice I have had to make. Any post in Russian cyrillic is marked as spam. Any post coming from a .ru domain is marked as spam. I can apologize to my real readers coming from Russia, but I’m not going to put up with this spam bullshit any more. Blame the spammers in your country.
Stop Forum Spam
Do you ever wonder why your blog is receiving comments in Russian cyrillic? Get the visitor maps plugin, and bookmark the stopforumspam.com site. You can enter the commentor’s email address, the home website they claim, even their IP address – which you can see in the visitor maps plugin. Every single one of these russian commentors shows up on the stopforumspam website, without exception.
These people, mostly from Prieli Latvia in my case, are trying to increase their SEO visibility by adding comments to our blogs. Don’t let them. I have my akismet spam filter set to mark all comments coming from the .ru domain as spam.
Akismet -
You can register with Akismet (wordpress.com actually) without having to sign up for a blog. They will email to you an API key (a short string of numbers and letters), you configure your Akismet plugin with this. It costs nothing, I have never received any email from Akismet nor have been bothered by them in any way.
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