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Free iPods/minis/ad nauseum is becoming the new spam

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting really annoyed by seeing comment posts for free iPods, free Mac minis, blah blah blah, everywhere I look?? It seems like it’s becoming the new spam. I’ve suffered through email spam (still not 100% solved but Gmail helps), blog spam (have implemented Jeff Barr’s solution for Wordpress, working so far), and now this.

Annoying.

I know comments are seen as free self-promotion but please, if you’re trying to get a free iPod/whatever, and want to include a link, link it to your name, don’t include the link in the body of your comment, and don’t mention it in your post. I actually haven’t seen too much of this here on TUAW which is *awesome*, thanks for being respectful everybody. But I wanted to head things off at the pass because I keep seeing a growing number of posts on other Mac sites/forums that say something along the lines of “Great post! Click here to get a free iPod.” You know, spam.

Thanks for listening to my rant. :)



Is it just me, or is anyone else getting really annoyed by seeing comment posts for free iPods, free Mac minis, blah blah...
 

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cephas cesar

Used farm tractors 100’s of tractors in stock on. A wide range of products of varied quality and price.

August 09 2005 at 4:28 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
cephas cesar

the free sports book Act now have some fun and make real money from now on. A life time opportunity to promote the dream magazine and make tons of cash.

July 28 2005 at 6:33 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bill cosby

COMPUTER CONSUMABLES Computer Sales & Service, Consumables, Refillings, AMC, Repairing Everything In Computers

July 15 2005 at 2:32 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bill cosby

sports book for free Act now have some fun and make real money from now on. If you are a sports lover, make money by reaching out to other sport lovers. url:- http://sportsbookusa.us

June 02 2005 at 6:00 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bill cosby

specialized in worldwide distribution of electronic components with emphasis on obsolete and hard to find devices

May 09 2005 at 10:47 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bill cosby

Low cost high quality Manufactures of Hydraulic and stainless steel hose assemblies

April 11 2005 at 9:10 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tom

Hey. If anyone wants a free ipod go to www.freeipods.com/?r=11174995 all u do is try one of the products for like a free 2 weeks then cancel if you dont like it, after completing the offer refer 5 friends and the ipod is yours.

February 12 2005 at 6:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
John

It will die eventually. A lot of the affiliate programs are already pulling their offers for many of the lesser sites. It won't be long before companies realize that all they're getting is cancellations.

February 08 2005 at 6:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Laurie

There have been plenty of those free mini/ipod/etc comments on handful of my posts here but I always kill them before they get a chance to go live :) Here at WIN, there are days when I think we need a larger team of anti-spam comment wranglers than we need bloggers!

February 06 2005 at 7:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Pariah S. Burke

John, I tried the trick of renaming the wp-comments*.php files to something completely obscure. I even took it one step further and put a 301 redirect into the .htaccess, pointing all requests for wp-comments*.php files to FBI.gov. Unfortunately, it only worked for about a day. Apparently the bots that look for wp-comments*.php also parse the files that point to them, thus discovering any name changes. Kitten's spaminator w/ 3Strikes erased my comment spam problem. Now I get roughly 3 manually entered spams per month, which are easy enough to remove (and prevent from ever appearing again). Trackback and referrer log spam are the latest things.

February 04 2005 at 6:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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