HOEI

Rachel over at Christians in Good Company has a post titled Google Reader: Friend or Foe? and it made me consider how feeds may be adversely affecting blog traffic.  I am not talking about your blog’s feed hurting your traffic even though that could be true since you don’t get hits on those readers if you are providing full post content in your feed, but rather I am talking about the feeds we read via tools like my Google Readers on my iGoogle page.  Much like Rachel, I often skip the process of visiting and commenting on posts I view in my reader even though I traditionally would have left a comment on many of the posts I read.  In my opinion that can and has led to the decline in traffic on my blog(s) since I am not leaving those little link crumbs pointing back to my blogs since I am not commenting nearly as much as I used to.

A flurry of comment spam has been going around in recent days with the following message:

“very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce”

There is no URL and the message is exactly the same on all the blogs where you find this comment.

What is this comment all about and who is Idetrorce?

In my humble opinion, this is a pre-attack campaign for a bigger spam campaign that will come in the next few weeks. The comment above would be okay on most blog posts since it is not trying to link people back to a product of service and it is just a polite disagreement. Once posted on a loosely moderated blog, the blogger might get a bad rap for deleting such a non threatening comment. Read the editors comments on the wormblog comment number 12.

“So I googled and found that it is indeed SPAM.

I am leaving it up though as I would never wish to be accused of deleting someone who simply disagreed with me.”

If a blogger does not block the email address and user name associated with this comment, then they could be opening themselves up to something much bigger coming down the pipe. That is just one man’s opinion. I am not afraid to delete and edit comments on my blog. I have even deleted some comments from people who agreed with me. When it’s my blog I will do what I think is in the best interest of my blog.

I do strict moderation on all comments on some of my blogs. There are very few terms I force moderate on here on this blog, but this user name and email address will be added to my list. I recommend you do the same with your blog. I just don’t have a good feeling about this Idetroce character.

In WordPress

Go to your Dashboard and select Options/Discussion. Scroll down and enter the user name, email address and IPs from this commenter. By the way, the IPs this person is sourcing from are out of Amsterdam.