If you have a blog, you surely get comment spam. I get nearly as many spam comments as regular ones. Thankfully, Akismet catches them and sends me an email to decide whether they are allowed or trashed.
The emails that come in show the URLs of the links in the comments. In a few emails this week, I noticed those URLs were from some pretty popular social networks.
The first one I noticed had a list of links from Bebo, the most popular social networking site in the UK. The list of URLs, offering all sorts of free porn, would otherwise appear to identify a female member of the Bebo community, save the numbers at the end – an almost sure giveaway that the profile on any social network is spam. I typed in one of the URLs and it went to a Bebo profile – with a link to another, not-so-family-friendly site.
Today, a blocked comment had links from My Mashable, the social network from Mashable.com, offering Accutane, a drug for acne. Even though there were many options, each link led to only one page. That page is down now – kusos to the Mashable team for removing the spam profile within hours.
I’m not trying to suggest that either site is responsible for the comment spam, and don’t think that these are the only two sites that spammers are jumping onto.
The praise a social networking site receives for its growth – as Bebo has received – rings hollow when it allows spammers to create fake profiles. Bebo, My Mashable, and other social networking sites need to do a better job to keep these types of profiles from being created in the first place.
I haven’t experienced any false profiles on Facebook. (I’m sure they’re there, I just haven’t seen any) Is Facebook doing something that these other sites aren’t that is keeping the spammers away? What do you think can be done to keep spammers off of social networking sites?
