They Never Give Up !

Fellow bloggers, this is an ongoing alert that spammers are still (and forever will be) among us. Several blogs including mine have been hit by certain spammers. I'm purposely not naming any as they don't need further notoriety.

That said it bears repeating that affected bloggers should remove such comments ASAP. And, if you see a dubious spam comment from a nefarious bad-doer on someone's blog, please and, as it was in the vintage Romper Room kids show, be a good "do-bee" and let them know, so they can delete it too.

The more due diligence that we fellow bloggers practice, then perhaps we can at least limit these low-lifes (restraint used here). Sadly, I'm not naive to the fact that they will never be entirely obliterated. Earlier posts in October 2018 and April 2018 have more on this topic.

Yesterday, I found the same lengthy spam comment left on recent posts. All identical from the same spammer and spaced a minute or so apart in the early a.m. I've opted not to identify this spammer or show the comment here for two reasons: there's no need to provided added visibility to this individual or to display such garbage again. 

They're no longer on those posts, but were marked as Spam and deleted. 

It's not enough to just Delete such comments. Doing so still reveals the name of the spammer as in this example seen recently on another blog. As you can see, it shows the blog administrator removed the comment, but the spammer's ID remains.

A better way is to mark them as Spam. These are the options in Blogger at the top of the Published Comments page. To check comments Click Comments > Published

Check the box next to the comment(s) then select Spam to move it to the Spam folder. This removes it from published post comments. You can check the Spam Folder to make sure that no "real" comments went there in error. If you find one, click Not Spam and it returns to the post comments. Then you can delete all the Spam ones. 

This isn't the first time that I or others have been spammed, sadly it won't be the last. Months ago, I admittedly didn't regularly check the Published Comments section in Blogger. Instead, I would only check the comments for a current post. 

Last year, after receiving notice from a fellow blogger of a spam comment. I started regularly checking Published Comments. 

Since then, I've come across Spam on posts published weeks or months ago. These show as recent Published Comments. Most likely, there are spam comments from months and months ago before I started doing checking and I'm not planning to backtrack through all those comments

Checking Published Comments regularly now is part of my  "blog maintenance."

Why care about Comment Spam? — Here's some reasons:

• It can make it seem like you don't care about your blog and if it's peppered with false links, you might be thought of as a bad online housekeeper. it could also hamper "legit" readers from commenting.
• It could cause Google to remove a blog (it's happened). Leaving a dubious link(s) can cause google to "punish" your site even if these are only in comments unknown to you. Google might assume you've allowed them in other places too.
• It endangers readers who should feel your site is safe. If one clicks on a bad link and a re-direct could lead to a malware site that infects a PC with spyware or a virus. That reader may spread the word to avoid your site. (Social media is a very powerful tool.)

As stated earlier, this post on spam resulted from my annoyance anger frustration (pick any or all 3) at seeing the same worthless Spammer comment on 10 recent posts and again today on 6! After online sleuthing, I found out that this same spammer has left this same garbage as far back as 2 years ago. Other bloggers ranted about it in their posts. 

Maybe we can't stop the spam, but we can at least delete it from our comments and alert fellow bloggers when we see it in their posted comments.