DRB readers, the writing team here needs you help immensely. Recently, the SBN family of sites have been encountering a problem with comment spam. This has become such a serious issue that nearly every site on the network has banned anonymous commenting (including DRaysBay, several months ago). Further, all commenting on pieces more than a week old have been banned. This is an issue that many sites have trouble with, considering the fact that some stories have attached discussions that carry on for weeks, even months in some cases, however it is needed to combat the biggest way in which spam users attack our sites: through comments on older articles no one looks at. It allows them to bump up their Google ranking for their sites and thus get more people to buy into their scams.
These circumstances are very regrettable, and surely something that we do not wish for. The types of people that do this cut down on the enjoyment of the Internet, and make life hell for the administrators trying to avoid them. We are doing our best here at SBN to combat this problem, and to that end, I think our initiatives are working. I can keep track of stories up to a week old and delete spam comments easily, as well as the users. We appear to be set for the future as far as this issue goes.
However it does not rectify the transgressions of these spam commentors in the past. Old spam comments still exist. I have done my best to try and eliminate the users and their comments, however I am positive that I haven't caught them all. Thus comes where I ask for your help. If you see any spam comment in any older story, please, PLEASE, contact either Jake or myself, as we can deal with the problem using our "nuclear capabilities". We have an option that allows us to erase a user and all of their comments with one click of the mouse, which eliminates the need for the tedious task of eliminating comments one by one. Folks, I am deleting users with more than 200 comments on older stories. I have caught two already, and I am sure there are many more that I have not seen.
I do not expect you all to take it upon yourselves to go through every story and help us out, as nice as that would be, that is a giant waste of time for us alone, much less you all. No, but if you are viewing perhaps a featured article or an older article for some reason, please take a moment to check the comments of that article for spam, and if you see it, pass along the link of the article to Jake or myself. By doing this relatively small thing, you are being a big help to the staff here. It may sound like a relatively minor issue, but we don't want spammers leaching onto the sight and benefiting of our backs, as well as bringing down our own Google rank. We simply don't want to be known as a spam haven. Your help in this matter is greatly appreciated.
Patrick L. Kennedy