PARTNERS: Please Check if your sites are being SPAMMED from Blog Posts
Guys,
I know it's coming into Christmas but I've been working on few Partner sites now and this keeps cropping up so I just wanted to raise it (again!) especially with BC's new anti spam features.
IF YOU USE THE DEFAULT BLOG FEATURE AND/OR COMMENTS MODULES:
DISABLE AUTOMATICALLY APPROVING COMMENTS UNLESS YOU ARE GOING TO MODERATE THEM.
Go to the blog and look at the posts and check the comments.
Spammers LOVE BCs sites. Why? Because if comments are set to automatically be approved they can just post away, and once they get a hold of your blog posts you'll have 1000's of comments within a few hours for uggboots, kayne west and inspirational sentences on an amazing blog with "funny litlte spellnig mistkaes".
Why are Spammers doing this? In the default comments module form you can specify a website address which gets placed behind the person's name. This is a link building gold mine as their link is being displayed on another website with a keword they've used for the person's name so you can understand why Spammers think BC is their BFF.
Why don't we notice this?
By Default, the Blog templates have comments enabled, comments are automatically approved and no emails are assigned to received notifications. BC is acutally trying to make our job easier, unfortuately it's being taken advantage of and unless you're checking your clients blog posts after go live ( .. anyone?) you're not going to notice unless a customer tells you because you have to read the blog post to see the comments. By this time it's too late and you'll spend the next hour or so sifting through the comments and deleting all the spam.
And it looks pretty bad. For all of us.
BC, perhaps err on the side of caution. Comments should be defaulted to be moderated, and spam detection turned on. At least if we forget about it or if we are lazy BC sites aren't being made the bi*ch of spammers, and we don't look like idiot for recommending an unsafe system that looks like it could be hacked.
