Tag Archives: spam

“Like” Spamming

I am getting a little fed up with receiving lots of likes on posts. Great, I enjoy good feedback like any other blogger and I appreciate that you appreciate what I write. However, there seems to be a growing trend on WordPress for “Like” spammers. That is, people who trawl hundreds of blogs in a day liking every post that they see yet never post a single comment. These people are not engaging with the content or using the feature in the spirit in which it is intended. It seems that the majority are not actually reading the posts they are liking.

How have I worked this out? Firstly, several times in the last few months I have acquired several “likes” on posts that have (at the time) registered zero hits. Secondly, I turned off “likes” on 2012 and all that several months ago yet I still get them. It is clear what is going on here. Using the reader (which shows only the first 50 or so words of the post) these bloggers are scrolling through a subscribed topic and hitting “like” on everything. Thirdly, I am seeing the same gravatar icons appearing on a wide range of blogs covering a multitude of subjects and in each case, they have not commented. So as of today, I have turned this feature off on this blog. Continue reading →

On spam

Since I posted the book review of Godless Morality by Richard Holloway, I’ve received a shedload of spam on that one post. Normal spam rate was about 2-3 per day but since then it has climbed to 10 per day (all of them are blocked by the way and all first posts must be approved by me so this crap will never get through even on the very rare occasions that Akismet fails to spot it).

This post can’t have been continually chosen at random, can it? Does the subject matter make such posts much more ripe for spamming? I’m genuinely interested to know if anybody has an answer about this. Anyway, just for fun here are the ten that I received for 28th May… Continue reading →