StumbleUpon, Spam Comments, and Why I Haven’t Blogged in a Month
Let me start with an apology for my, how shall I put it … less than prolific blogging over the past month. Ironically, I released the Ready Fire Aim RSS Widget, and then didn’t follow it with any content in my feed! I’ve been extremely busy with mid term exams (thank you, WFU Calloway School of Business and Accountancy). After two weeks of 5AM bedtimes and 9AM alarm clocks, I took a week off and headed to the beach to relax and catch up on sleep.
Imagine my surprise when I came back today to find that this post had received over 2,500 hits in just a few days. This seemed strange to me because the Windows version of the walkthrough had always been more popular. After checking my referrer logs, I realized that almost all of the traffic was coming from StumbleUpon. I’d heard of StumbleUpon before, but had never actually tried it. Spurred by this influx of traffic to my blog, I installed the StumbleUpon toolbar. This thing is addictive. Every time I press the “stumble” button, I’m presented with a new site I’ve never seen before. I can even customize which types of sites I’m interested in. At first I had expected that the service would be vulnerable to spammers and commercial sites with no real content, however, I learned that there is an approval system for paid content, and user feedback is also considered when displaying sites (similar to Digg). What a great time waster!
Speaking of spam, in addition to the 2,500+ hits on the Verizon/OS X walkthrough, I also received just over 800 pieces of comment spam, all of it caught by Akismet (and with no false positives too!). This means that 30% of all the visits to that article during the past week were by spam bots (and that’s just the ones that figured out how to leave a comment). This seems a huge number to me, especially when it seems that the spike in spam was correlated to the spike in traffic from StumbleUpon. The reason I find it strange is that I cannot find a link to my site anywhere on StumbleUpon.com - it seems the only way to find my article is by pressing the “stumble” button on the toolbar. This means that typical web crawling spam bots wouldn’t find me, and that those bots that did must somehow be surfing through the StumbleUpon service.
Can anyone that uses StumbleUpon take a guess as to why this might be? Is there an HTML link somewhere on StumbleUpon’s site that I missed? Let me know in the comments.
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