I just finished taking down another WordPress blog.

This is one that I had started to set up, but never finished. Never mentioned it anywhere, never linked to it from anywhere.

Yet, the spammers were able to find it.

I had set it up only to do the design work on the site. So, all the content was the default WordPress content. That is, the “Hello world!” post and the “This is an example of…” default About page. And the default comment on the “Hello world!” post.

Yet, the spammers managed to find it. On top of that, traffic continued to grow! From the spammers, of course. You’d think the lack of comments on the site (because I never approved a single one of them) might be a hint, but no. I guess their spambots aren’t sophisticated enough to check to see whether a site actually posts comments.

I guess it must get passed around somewhere as a place to leave your spam comments, even though no comments were ever approved.

With January not even over yet, the traffic on the site had already surpassed December’s.

And this was with no promotion whatsoever. The spammers must have some way of checking recently registered domain names and then seeing if a WordPress blog is installed. As I recall, it was just a couple short weeks after setting up the blog that I started getting spam comments.

At any rate, the spammers will be in for a shock now. Well, maybe not an actual shock, because they are just little spambots and not actual people posting these comments on how great and wonderful and useful the default “Hello world!” WordPress post was.

I took the blog down, and have the domain forwarding to another one of my sites. One where they have to register to leave a comment. And, I don’t have an automated registration system. So, the bots won’t know how to handle it.

At any rate, it’ll cut down on the amount of eMail I receive, since I will no longer receive notifications from WordPress that someone has commented on the blog.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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